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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27722614">a long cold lonely winter</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/feralphoenix/pseuds/feralphoenix'>feralphoenix</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Hollow Knight (Video Games)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Abandonment Issues, Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Alternate Universe - Somebody Lives/Not Everyone Dies, Australian Sign Language, Borderline Personality Disorder, Chronic Illness, Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - C-PTSD, Disabled Character, Don't copy to another site, F/F, F/M, Friends With Benefits, Gen, Genocide, Graphic Description of Injury, Grief/Mourning, Medical Trauma, Mental Breakdown, Politics, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Rape Aftermath, Sexual Content, Spoilers, Survivor Guilt, Xeno</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-11-26</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-02-18</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-10 16:55:17</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>3</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>32,555</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27722614</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/feralphoenix/pseuds/feralphoenix</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>They could have lost her then. It was such a very near thing.</i>
</p><p>In which Grimm pays his old roommate a visit.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Grimm &amp; The Knight (Hollow Knight), Grimm &amp; The Radiance &amp; Unn (Hollow Knight), Grimm &amp; The Radiance (Hollow Knight), Grimm/The Radiance (Hollow Knight), The Radiance/Unn (Hollow Knight)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>40</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>44</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. the world is afraid of those who cry</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p><i>(Regrets collect like old friends</i> – Don’t desert me, don’t be horrified at me. You know what I am.)</p><p> </p><p>the dynamic i like to imagine between radi &amp; grimm is described <a href="https://ankhors.dreamwidth.org/24952.html">in my faq</a>, but the tl;dr version is "Assigned Roommates At Birth childhood friends/affectionate exes/bffs whom love each other and sometimes Do An Sex for fun/comfort but it's VERY strictly no romo"--if this clashes very strongly with your preferred headcanons (ex. if you're very firmly camp "i like it when radi &amp; grimm are siblings") you may want to give this fic a pass lol.</p><p>in this first chapter you'll also find some very background grimm/brumm mutual pining, which is a relationship grimm's chosen not to pursue at this time because of the power imbalance.</p><p>finally: grimm's plumbing depends on what the previous grimmchild's was, and he's used to it differing by transmigration. in the first chapter, his body is intersex; his body post-timeskip is perisex and (in western human/hallownest terms) dmab.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>He sends the Troupe on ahead of him: Better to at least send <em>someone, </em>to mitigate the call. He’ll be along after soon enough, he assures them. Brumm gives him the slightest bit of a <em>look </em>but doesn’t say anything.</p><p>And, well. Grimm understands the risks better than anyone else: Though the Troupe is an extension of him, a pseudo-hive mind, the others can’t feel the child about to be born from the fire, nor can they feel the beginning of the ache deep in Grimm’s lungs, so subtle yet and so familiar by now that he shan’t betray it.</p><p>But there’s that and then there’s <em>this.</em></p><p>Yes, the Ritual is Grimm’s duty, Grimm <em>is </em>the Ritual, the eternal loop of end to beginning, fire to purge and consecrate. No matter his reputation for irreverence and caprice, the Ritual is the one obligation he’ll never waver in fulfilling. It draws him like a lodestone. And furthermore, his continued existence depends on it.</p><p> </p><p>Some things are still more important.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>It’s always been <em>easy </em>to enter the Dream Realm. Much as Grimm loves some of the more fanciful stories people tell about the realms’ split, it’s still as much his home as the Nightmare Realm is, still where he came into being.</p><p>He hasn’t actually <em>explained </em>it to any mortals. There are only two people in all of the wide world and all the realms who are close enough to his heart for him to bare it, and they’re Higher Beings like him. It’s easy for them both to understand, even for Unn, who wasn’t present for it.</p><p>But he <em>has </em>thought of how he might explain it to someone, Brumm maybe, if Brumm ever thought to ask. (This is its own problem in and of itself and Grimm <em>resolutely </em>avoids that issue, will until the end of time: It’s a bad lane to go down.) The simile at least is good.</p><p>It’s easier to think of the Dream Realm as a very over-glorified house. Perhaps a floor of a house. And this house is where he, as one half of a twofold expression of the concept of <em>dream, </em>was born and raised. It’s his and always has been his.</p><p>Splitting the realms was like… like building a wall in that floor of the house, to turn it into two rooms, to make them into separate spaces. So now he can do whatever he likes with his half without squabbling over the aesthetics clash, and pursue his hobbies and interests without dubious onlookers, and can bring his friends over without embarrassing himself over the mismatched décor. But even if this half-room is the part that is <em>his </em>space, he still has the key to the <em>house. </em>He can still visit the other half of the room if he simply opens the door.</p><p>She’s in the wisteria dream.</p><p>This one is old, familiar. Most of the times Grimm came to visit specifically within dreams this is where she was. He used to tease her a little about how on-brand it was: Soft light, soft flowers in soft colors, simple and easy beauty under a gentle sky. If he arrived in the daytime the place would always be full of her children, some hiding amongst the dangling flowers and observing him through their petals, some approaching him brazenly. Even when he got to her there’d be a gaggle of them tucked under her wing. He remembers the crispness of the wind and the sweet perfume of the flowers, the way he would close his eyes and tilt his head back and breathe deep, because plain prettiness might not be his <em>thing </em>but he could still enjoy it in occasional doses.</p><p>He’d tease her about it, and she’d laugh at him and remind him of his dark smoky realm all stitched together and full of cackling Grimmkin puppets ready to leap out and frighten anyone. One or the other of them would joke about how out of control they both got when they didn’t have each other around to enforce moderation, and once Unn was with them she would say something kind and diplomatic about how much more freeing it is to have space to be on one’s bullshit full-time. And then they’d simply lay about together, banter or sleep, enjoy the time they had before somebody lit a lantern and Grimm had to leave for distant lands.</p><p>The wisteria dream looks nothing like that anymore.</p><p>The path is crowded with snapped twigs, and everywhere he steps he crushes petals underfoot. What remains of the flowers’ curtains are threadbare, mostly-naked stalks dangling, here and there a single petal still clinging. Above him the sky roils: Choking blue-gray clouds churned by the air currents, parting to spill scalding shafts of white-gold light. These dazzle the eye where they land, and scatter red-gold through the breaks in the cloud cover. There is wind. It smells staticky but isn’t enough to blow away the ruin of the sacred flowers.</p><p>Grimm would avoid them if he could, but there’s about no place to step without trampling something. He clambers over broken boughs, hops and glides until his feet rest upon bare ground.</p><p>There used to be a temple here, or something like a suggestion of one, all open walls and not much ceiling. It’s all rubble now. She’s there on the precipice looking out across the thick expanse of cloud below. Flickers of golden Dream essence light up the great nothingness like stars, or lumaflies. Further away dry lightning crackles at the horizon. She’s got to know he’s here—this is her realm, he’s making noise, not bothering to hide his presence. He couldn’t, anyway, not from her; they are two halves of a whole, two expressions of the same core concept, all divergent evolution aside. But she doesn’t turn. She just takes a big, shuddery breath as he draws closer, and breathes out in a sigh. Her fur ripples with the motion. Her wings are held mostly at rest but he can see them twitching all the way from the base, vibrating like she’s one of her children about to take to the air.</p><p>He stops, about forearm’s length away, careful. Every line in her body is drawn tight. He has never thought of her as fragile, though she’s never been shy of her distaste for violence. All three of them are <em>forces of nature, </em>but she most of all has always been the pure embodiment of her own name, her own nature, vital and irrepressible. Right now Grimm has the terrible sense that if he touches her even a little too carelessly she will come apart at the seams. It’s damn discomfiting. It’s been centuries and he still doesn’t know what to do.</p><p>“Radi,” he says, in lieu of anything else.</p><p>The pet name finally gets her to turn, and she looks at him, all at once like she’s taking in every detail yet staring right through him.</p><p>“Grimm, you look like shit,” says Radiance. She <em>sounds </em>like shit, sounds exhausted. “Don’t you need to be going? Should you even be here?”</p><p>“It can wait for another night,” he says. “Even for the Ritual, I don’t want to waltz out without saying a proper goodbye to at least <em>you.”</em></p><p>She takes the bait, focuses on him properly. “You tried Unn?”</p><p><em>“Tried. </em>I physically walked all the way down to her little hidey-hole in the lake but she wouldn’t come out.” An echo of the frustration flares deep in the pit of his stomach—annoyance at being ignored (him! <em>Grimm! ignored!) </em>and the cold-burning fear that he’s been too much, alienated one of his dearest friends altogether. “I don’t suppose you’ve had much more luck?”</p><p>Her feathers fan apart just a little and she makes a quiet defeated noise. “Barely. Unn still allows me into her dream, but—she won’t speak to me, she just lies there, she hardly moves. I’ve tried filling the silence, or just staying there with her. Nothing seems to work.”</p><p>Grimm has the terrible urge to complain that it’s been <em>centuries, </em>but Radi isn’t a good audience for that brand of complaint; she’ll come down on Unn’s side quicker than a heartbeat. And besides, it’s been centuries in her case too. Grimm is the lucky one. He has no land, no <em>children, </em>not really. He hasn’t got any singular holy ground to be desecrated; he’s a traveler that eats the carrion of dead lands. He can’t understand. He <em>knows </em>he can’t understand what Radiance is feeling, or Unn, that he should be glad he can’t. But it itches all the same.</p><p>“You know her,” he says instead, smiling and spreading his claws wide. “We both do. Better to keep trying than let her stew in it by herself. And I think you’ll have more luck than I would, Radi dear.”</p><p><em>“Stop,” </em>she says, and for just a moment she sounds almost like her old self. But he only has a moment to hope before she looks away from him, turning a slow-motion pirouette to stare out over all the nothing again.</p><p>Heat courses through him and he very nearly sways on his feet. He wants to shout, to cry, to pick something up and break it. To sink his claws into her shoulder and twist her back around to face him. To break the cloud cover apart with flame so it all rains out warm in a matter of seconds, retrieving the periwinkle sky beyond.</p><p>“Someone needs to do something,” Radiance says. Her voice is full of that alien heaviness and sharpness, pulled tightly into itself with the same tension of her body. These are words she’s spoken many times over this awful expanse, but there’s a new note to the old tune this time and it strikes a chord of warning in the back of Grimm’s neck. “I think that this is bigger than Unn is able to handle. Especially while things continue their downward trend. I fear she may remain in that state for as long as the bastard worm and his pet root eat at her land for their own amusement.”</p><p>“Radi,” he says, and something of his worry must be leaking through because she half-raises her wings with every single feather stretched out and straining.</p><p>“I know,” she says, voice catching stubborn and—alarm gets its hooks into his chest and <em>tugs—</em>audibly on the verge of tears. “I know, Grimm, I fucking know. But my children are <em>dying. </em>No one is doing anything about it, no one even <em>can. </em>I don’t know if I have it in me, truly, but—but I have to <em>try.”</em></p><p>“Radi,” he says again.</p><p>She turns to him, fur all on end, scattering tiny luminescent scales like glowing dust. Tears already course down her face in a shock of molten gold, beading upon the down of her chest and threatening to mat her fur. “There are only bad choices and worse choices left for me and I hate all of them, Grimm, I truly do. I don’t want this. But the worst choice of all would be to sit idly by and do nothing. It’s unconscionable.”</p><p>Grimm reaches out and cups her face in one hand. She closes her eyes and leans her cheek into his palm, warm, sticky with tears. Her breath keeps hitching and she can’t seem to hold her wings still, buzzing them from the shoulders, twitchily fanning out the feathers as though to frighten off a foe.</p><p>“Radi, Radi, Radi,” he says, croons as much as his fucked-up windpipe will let him, and steps in the rest of the way to hold her. The top of his head only reaches to her chest where she floats in midair, but that’s more than enough. He works the digits of his right claw against her soft down, combing through it and smoothing it out, and rubs the side of his thumb over her face. She’s still taking deep uneven breaths as though to avoid breaking down and sobbing but warm wet keeps rolling over his fingers, and when she curls her shaking wings around him her grip is tight. “Radi-radi.”</p><p>“Cut it out,” she says wetly as he nuzzles into her chest and sets his whole thorax thrumming with a rickety, wheezing purr. “I hate it when you do that to try to force me into feeling better.”</p><p>“Ah, does that mean it’s working, then?” he says, deliberately bright and cutesy. The effect is only a little ruined by the way the purr makes his words warble and draws his breath short.</p><p>“Fuck you,” she says, but her voice is warm and teeters on the edge of laughter.</p><p>He nestles for a few moments longer, purring as strongly as he’s able, so the whole of his carapace rattles: Twisting his body from side to side in her embrace, pressing his head, his shoulders, his back into her fur. It’s not enough, though. Certainly not enough to truly comfort his best and oldest friend over all her heartaches—that’s been beyond his abilities since this began. But in the shorter term, there <em>is </em>more that he can do for her here and now, and none of that can happen if he passively lets her hold him surrounded by the wreckage of her very heart.</p><p>“Radi,” he says to the base of her shoulder, “when’s the last time you’ve taken your legs off? You know it makes everything seem that much bleaker when they’re hurting you.”</p><p>“I,” says Radiance, and then there’s a long pause. Grimm looks up at her, stretching his chin to plant the whole of his throat flat against the side of her chest; her golden eyes are narrowed as though she’s thinking. “I don’t remember. I’m not sure.”</p><p>“Well,” says Grimm with deliberate practical cheer, “probably better to relocate to somewhere more comfortable to sit for that, wouldn’t you say?”</p><p>She hesitates just a moment and then sighs and says “All right.” Grimm twists again to free up one arm, holds up his claw, and snaps.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>The wisteria dream folds gently, spreads out into a red silk floor strewn with plush black and gold cushions, lit softly by red flames and gold, curtained in gauzy gold and white. He can’t really help choosing at least <em>some </em>colors he likes better than Radiance’s favored saturated pastels, all her sky and cloud and flower hues, but he keeps the dreamscape as soft and safe as he’s able: Nary a row of jagged stitches nor spate of ominous shadows to be seen, not even any hidey-holes ideal for concealing a gaggle of puppets.</p><p>If she’s got any criticisms for his interior decoration choices, Radiance keeps them to herself. She looses her wings from about Grimm’s body and sighs and sinks down upon a heap of pillows, flopping down on her back at an angle and stretching out, eyes shuttering to narrow crescents.</p><p>Grimm pulls up a cushion beside her and sits there, stretching out. Gently he pats Radiance’s flank: “Legs,” he reminds her.</p><p>She makes a long noncommittal sound, but light flashes off the white metal of the prosthetics and they dissolve into a spray of golden essence, baring what remains of her thighs.</p><p>For one long and terrible moment Grimm is back to looking down upon her body with Unn, staring at the awful gray of blood caked in Radiance’s fur, more leaking from the open wounds, by his own <em>heart </em>they looked crushed or, or <em>bitten, </em>shattered bits of shell threatening to flake off, her eyes wide and unfocused and streaming molten gold that swirled like oil where tears mixed with pooled blood, little filaments of the Light at her core escaping. He smells rotten blood, <em>tastes </em>it all the way down into his lungs, nearly chokes on the memory of the stench mingled with the sharp scent of tears, the bitter perfume of smoke. His ears ring at the distant echo of her scream. His claws clench reflexively against how it felt to <em>cut.</em></p><p>He takes a deep breath and closes his eyes. That was a long time ago, and Radiance is all right, and he and Unn made it through that unpleasantness.</p><p>(Still. They could have lost her then, <em>would </em>have if any more of her children had fallen under the wyrm’s thrall, if Unn had found her even an hour later. It was such a very near thing.)</p><p>With a deft touch he pushes her fur up to check for sores: The stumps healed clean after they were cauterized, but the prostheses put pressure on the fragile carapace and she doesn’t like to take the legs off unless Grimm or Unn is there with her to nag her to. He keeps checking, lifting the limbs and probing with his claws, careful to keep his fingertips well out of reach of anywhere they wouldn’t be welcome right now. He finds bruises, a few chafed spots, but nothing worse.</p><p>Only then does Grimm drape himself over Radiance’s lap and start to purr again. It’s not exactly the most <em>comfortable </em>place to rest; her down is wonderful to lounge against but balancing is a bit of a delicate maneuver considering how little is left of her legs. Still, it’s worth it just to hear the way she sighs in gratitude for his high body temperature and the slight pressure of his negligible weight, for the rumbles he emanates encouraging her to relax and her immune system to repair her little hurts.</p><p>He stays there for a good long time, long enough to drowse. She lets him, offering no complaint; she doesn’t speak at all, barely moves. If not for the uneven rhythm of her breathing he would think she’s fallen asleep.</p><p>Presently Grimm rises, makes sure to meet Radiance’s gaze so she’s aware of what he’s doing. Crawling over her lap to sit on her other side, shins still stretched out over her thighs, he licks the ridges of his forearms and sets about carefully combing out her fur.</p><p>She arches a little against the cushions and he murmurs, slowing; finally she sighs and closes her eyes and submits to his ministrations. Fear keeps her remaining natural limbs tucked away, and doubtless she feels much safer without them vulnerable, but her brooding reflects in the weather of her realm and the winds and rains don’t do her coat any favors. Between the thick blanket of long guard hairs and the thicker layer of fluffy down underneath there’s a lot of room for tangles. Grimm fusses at her until she raises a wing to slap at him without force: He draws back, holding his claws out to show her he’s stopped, and Radiance rises awkwardly from the pillow heap to give a great shudder and flap her wings several times in quick succession. Fluff scatters everywhere, and briefly Grimm thinks about how disgruntled Brumm would get about the shoulders should he see the mess. (This is a stupid thought to have, Grimm decides, and banishes it from his mind forthwith.)</p><p>At last she sits back down, but fixes Grimm with a warning stare when he reaches for her again and puffs her wings up, twitching.</p><p>“Too much?” he asks, nonchalant.</p><p>“Whatever’s given you <em>that </em>idea,” she replies, tetchy. At least her fur is smooth and shiny again where Grimm’s groomed it.</p><p>“Honestly I forget sometimes how overstimulating it can be,” he says, and stretches out on his front next to her instead of sitting on her again. “I rather like not being furry. It’s so much more low-maintenance.”</p><p>She laughs a little. “You say this as though you aren’t many times more vain than I.”</p><p>He is purring again. He can’t help it: Radiance used to laugh freely, once, but now every little bit of laughter he can get out of her is hard-won and precious.</p><p>(He wants that version of her <em>back, </em>a pain so debilitating he can barely stand whenever it comes over him. She was so bright, always bright, always the most cheerful of the three of them, unfettered as the sky and with moods as mercurial as the weather. Whatever she feels she feels with her whole self, like she’s never known any other emotion before, and Grimm knows what that’s like for himself, as though his every feeling is a fire that rages to consume him, but—but where this makes him feel like ash and death his Radiance embodies her own heart like the atmosphere. A strong wind, or thunder, or light rain giving way to sun. Harnessed into something beautiful, instead of caged up until it feels like he’s rotting from the inside out.</p><p>She has had only the one mood, since it happened. The turbulent storm clouds, the distant lightning, only brief flashes of her former self allowed through. She is wound tight and brittle and very nearly a stranger in her desperation, her bitterness. Grimm would pay any price to cast this terrible weight from her heart.</p><p>He does not know to whom he should make this offer.)</p><p>“Oh, Grimm,” she says, and her voice is weary but still warm. “Grimm, Grimm, Grimm. You can get closer than that if you want.”</p><p>He raises his head to look Radiance in the face, purr cut off with an awkward <em>mrt? </em>that should only be appropriate for the child to make. But she smiles to hear it from him, eyes narrowing just slightly, so he supposes he’ll accept it. “That won’t be too much too soon?”</p><p>“I don’t think so. If I need you to move I’ll tell you.”</p><p>“Well, then,” he says, and rolls so he’s tucked up close to her side, halfway disappeared into her fur. His whole body starts to rattle again automatically: He can’t help it. He would stay here with her for days if he only had the time to spare.</p><p>“You’re not going to insist on finishing giving me a bath?” she asks, wry.</p><p>“I <em>could,” </em>he says, folding his limbs to create <em>just </em>the right sort of delicious pressure, “or I could mess all that fluff up again, and worry about fixing it later.”</p><p>“Grimm,” she says, starting to laugh.</p><p>“Radi,” he says back, mock-serious but smiling broadly. He arches his back and lifts his hips up, takes a deliberate deep breath and everts the fuzzy coils of his coremata from the base of his abdomen.</p><p>This particular body only has two, not four, and they’re very short compared to the scenting tentacles he usually gets when he transmigrates into a body that has them at all. But they still wriggle when he sashays his hips, and the pheromones they disperse flood the space he’s made with the smell of sex so his heartbeat quickens and he slicks up with hopeful wetness.</p><p>“Grimm,” Radiance says tenderly, laughing in full now, “pack those things back up your damn ass, they make you look like a buffoon.”</p><p>“They’re a hit with the mortals, though,” he says, rising up on hands and knees to better curl his body coquettishly. “And that’s not the <em>point. </em>The <em>point </em>is, do I <em>smell </em>sexy?”</p><p>“You certainly smell <em>horny.” </em>She sits up, too, and carefully curves one wing so her feathers stroke his face. He arches his back and pushes his cheek into the touch. “But, my dear, you have to put those away or else I shan’t give you a hand with that. This is non-negotiable.”</p><p>“If you <em>insist,” </em>he says tragically, though he can’t stop smiling. He packs the tentacles back up his ass. The pheromones he’s released aren’t going anywhere, either way.</p><p>Very, very carefully, even a little fearfully, she unfolds only two of her arms. Her claws shake a little as she reaches out to trace his shell, and he purrs to reassure her, touches at her forearms as gently as he knows how. Gingerly she folds the left arm underneath his arms and wings; he buries his claws in the fur of her middle and plants his forehead to her chest. The claws of her free hand touch near timidly at the red scales of his thorax, and he sighs even though it makes his voice warble, when she skates them further down.</p><p>It’s not as though it’s been so long since <em>he </em>had sex. Having an actual <em>relationship </em>with a mortal, even a short-term one, is what his dear Radi would call <em>unconscionable, </em>but one-night stands are a different matter. There’s an endless stream of ephemeral bugs drawn in by the mystique of Troupe Master Grimm enough for a tumble, for a night of fun.</p><p>It’s just that it’s been so long since he’s had sex with <em>her. </em>Radiance who knows him, Radiance who loves him with the warm steadfastness of long friendship if not the flash and fire of romance, Radiance who accepts every possible permutation of his body, who’s held him through every change of form he’s had over long millennia. Her claws are kind and knowledgeable upon the outer lips of his pussy that aren’t quite long or stiff enough to act as proper claspers, her thumb and foreclaw experienced in the handling of a cock that’s closer in length to a clit. She knows one finger inside him is all he can physically handle with a pussy this narrow and she knows how to work just her right claw to make his body <em>sing.</em> He doesn’t even have to nudge her away after he comes and is too sensitive to handle any further touch. She already knows exactly when to stop.</p><p>When he’s got his breath back and isn’t risking a coughing fit she allows him to coax her back down upon the pillows, lets him smooth her fur beneath his claws on his way down. Grimm kneels upon silk between her thighs and parts her fur and down with the utmost care. He feels a touch at the crown of his head and looks up just a moment to find she’s left one arm unfolded to stroke him: For some reason this makes him want to weep. Instead he bows his head to his chosen task.</p><p>He finds her warm and wet and sweet and attempts to persuade her as to the benefits of giving oneself flexible jaws and a supple tongue, purring in breathless bursts all the while. One day—one day, when all this is over, he hopes she’ll finally allow Unn to hear her like this: The cute quiet sounds she makes, the occasional soft curse. Radi has only ever allowed Grimm to touch her this way, and as touched by this as he is it’s too good a secret to not let Unn in on it too, after all the time they’ve spent circling the matter of their unspoken feelings. He loves them both far too much not to want that for them.</p><p>He brings her up and down one peak, then a second when she asks it of him. After this he carefully wipes his face dry and grooms the wet out of her down to keep it from clumping later, and crawls back up the cushions to curl up next to her.</p><p>He should say something, he thinks idly. This time the Ritual calls him far, but Radiance will be here, and though the two of them <em>are </em>Dream and Nightmare he will not be able to travel to see her easily. And after that, for some time, he will have to wait for his next body to mature to be able to find her again.</p><p>But he can’t think of anything he hasn’t said to her already. Perhaps his choice to stay the night with her will communicate how he feels without needing to struggle for words.</p><p>Grimm pillows his head on Radiance’s chest and sleeps.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Morning comes as inexorably as it always does, and Radiance clears away Grimm’s ostentatious love den with one elegant sweep of a wing. She hasn’t brought them to the wisteria dream again, but rather to the mountaintop. Her statue is still here, Grimm realizes through the haze of the Dream, and her children’s writings, even though it’s been some time since she was overthrown. This one place, at the very least, is out of the wyrm’s reach.</p><p>He can feel the pull, so much more insistent: He has to leave <em>now. </em>It is time for the Ritual to begin. Still, Grimm lingers.</p><p>“What are you going to do?”</p><p>Radiance draws a deep breath and stares out across the crater. Even the town at the surface is completely unrecognizable, he notes. He’s been here and there in the centuries that have passed but he hasn’t looked down from here, he hadn’t realized.</p><p>“First I will call,” she says. “Perhaps there’s someone still here who might listen.”</p><p>“And if that doesn’t work?”</p><p>“I’ll try harder,” she says. “I won’t allow the worm to silence me again.” A pause. She takes another deep breath. Her fur is cleaner and she looks less tired but that air of tension, of desperation, is back again. “And if that doesn’t work… I suppose I’ll do what I must. I will work on my defenses anyway, just in case.”</p><p>“Be <em>careful, </em>Radi,” he says, and reaches out to hold her face between his claws. She stoops a bit to press their foreheads together. “It may yet be some time, but I’ll be back to check in while I’m able.” And he hesitates, but blurts out, “I wish I could stay.”</p><p>“No, you need to go,” she says, and her voice is kind and it is steady. “We both know it’ll only hurt you to push it. I don’t need you <em>and </em>Unn both hurt. It should give me some peace of mind, to know that at least you are safe.”</p><p>“Take care of yourself,” he says. “And take care of Unn.”</p><p>He releases her and steps back. Radiance straightens up. Grimm knows she must still be feeling some degree of turmoil but none of it shows in her face or posture. Far from the directionless energy of the previous day, she looks resolute.</p><p>“I shall,” she says. Her eyes narrow just a little in an expression not quite a smile. “Safe journey, dear Grimm.”</p><p>Grimm bows to her in a flourish and steps into the flame. Her eyes don’t leave his for a moment.</p><p> </p><p>This is almost the last time he ever sees her.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>to anyone who's looking at the mention of grimm's coremata and quietly whispering "what... the fuck is that" but is too afraid to ask: Yes, That's A Real Thing. a handful of moth and butterfly species have them. they're only for wafting pheromones to appeal to potential mates, but they are Very silly-looking. these articles have photos/videos so, like, beware the faceful of Weird Bug Biology you'll get when you click, but you can read a basic breakdown of what they are/how they work <a href="https://www.wired.com/2013/12/this-is-not-a-penis/">here</a> or <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/moths-weird-inflatable-butt-going-viral-it-has-real-purpose-693183">here</a>.</p><p>grimm's in particular are based on <i>creatonotos gangis</i> coremata (the moth pictured at the top of the second article) because he's ott. since he's a calyptra moth under all the glamours, yes, that means he Purposely Gave Himself Inflatable Butt Tentacles Solely For The Drama. you Know he would.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. the art of coming too late as early as possible</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>readers, please direct your attention to the new tags that have been added for this chapter. due to the previous installment i do not think it will surprise everyone that this is a fic about radiance's trauma: however, <b>i would like to reiterate that tonight we are discussing what the hollow knight canonically does to her in ending 3</b> (i.e. oral rape via digital penetration which has deliberate visual parallels to vaginal rape via same). if you love hollow very much and this topic is too uncomfortable for you, that's ok. please give the rest of this fic a pass for your own well-being.</p><p>there is a vital conversation to be had about how hollow's canon characterization/behavior/narrative treatment flies in the face of the popular idea that victim and assailant are binary states + the pervasive western belief that only "pure" or "perfect" victims deserve care, how their actions in ending 3 are a direct product of how their father the pale king abused and groomed them, etc. <b><span class="u">this is <i>not</i> a conversation appropriate for this fic; it is radi time right now. please be respectful in any comments you leave/anywhere else you might discuss this fic</span>.</b></p><p>this chapter involves trauma flashbacks and some medical passages that are both gross for the reasons you'd expect and are depicted as unavoidable boundary violations, plus some nongraphic mentions of emeto. everybody here is having a very intense emotional experience. please be aware of what you are getting into if you choose to keep reading.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“Do you ever feel, sometimes, that…” Unn says one day when the dust has long since settled. Grimm waits for her to continue but she has fallen silent: Lost the thread, or cut herself off.</p><p>He doesn’t push: Either she’ll finish the thought or she won’t, and pressing her won’t help matters. This was a lesson learned swiftly, and Grimm does not need it repeated.</p><p>The light through the heavy, soupy cloud cover is weak, but it’s nevertheless daylight. So much has changed, and so abruptly, that much must still be done to establish some sort of tenuous structure for the scattered survivors. It is not Grimm who bears the brunt of these responsibilities, but there are tasks that only he can perform, so to speak. Between the work he’s shouldered and the rest of the situation, he spends much time with Unn but little time with her <em>alone. </em>The privacy she needs to venture thoughts like whatever she’s trying to articulate now is scarce and precious, and there’s some sharp petulance deep in his shell that grouses her long silences squander it. Grimm smothers it. Unn’s wounds are hidden away within her heart where they can’t be seen by mortal eyes, but that does not make them any less raw. She deserves his patience, all the more so because he was unable to help her when all this started, so long ago.</p><p>Instead of complaining he leans a little, pressing his more-negligible-than-usual weight against the side of her body. The immaturity of his current form may mean he can’t spread out his warmth as much as he’d like, but as he’s not even fully reached adulthood he has a great deal of time yet before the rot returns to his lungs, so when he purrs into Unn’s soft fat it’s quiet and steady and strong.</p><p>Unn tilts her great head and swivels her eyestalks to look down at him for a brief moment, then returns to facing forward, staring steadily into the horizon.</p><p>“Grimm,” she says at last. “Do you ever feel like this is our fault?”</p><p>This surprises him quite out of purring, and he doesn’t pull away from her but he looks up at her, and when he does his eyes are very round. “I hardly think we should steal the wyrm’s credit for this disaster, my dear.”</p><p>“I don’t mean…” Unn closes her mouth and lowers her head, makes a low creaking noise from somewhere deep in her torso. “Of course the Pale Beings deserve blame. I don’t want to suggest that isn’t true. But.”</p><p>There’s another long silence. Grimm presses his cheek into her side and resumes purring, the better to encourage her gently.</p><p>“She needed us,” Unn says. “She needed us but we weren’t here.”</p><p>Swift pain runs through his body, akin to being speared upon a longnail. He opens his jaws to speak but finds he cannot, that even his purring has been choked to silence.</p><p>“We weren’t here, and she needed us,” Unn goes on, this time a little louder, the words coming faster, shaking with some terrible emotion. “The worm and the Root were the ones who stole her land. They’re the ones who slaughtered her children. The worm is the one who imprisoned her, and the Vessel was her prison.</p><p>“But, Grimm. <em>We’re </em>the ones who left her all alone.”</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>The darkness is so absolute that even by the light his own body emits Grimm can barely see the ends of his own limbs. He adjusts his grip upon the unlit torch in his hands, and again. There is a slow, crawling roiling within him, for shallow experience is already enough to inform him that this will be rough.</p><p>In the absence of a distinct ground he imagines footholds, picks his way through the nothingness half-gliding, straining every sense.</p><p>He hears her before he sees her and cold burns his arms at what it is he hears: <em>No, no, no, please—</em>more a whimper than a voice. Worn to a harsh croak that squeaks. Worse, burbling: Not the wetness of tears, but fluid in the throat, thicker than blood.</p><p>
  <em>No more. Please, please, no more.</em>
</p><p>Grimm clutches the torch and arrows toward the sound.</p><p>There: A light.</p><p>She is so faint in the oily blackness, faint and fading yet: Her body is crumpled from rough handling, one wing horribly bent at the shoulder like it’s dislocated and the other broken so raw chitin juts through the feathers.  One of her prostheses is missing, leaving the stump beneath naked and twitching. Her fur is stained: Caked gray with blood from countless wounds. Matted gold with tears that still trail from her unfocused eyes like rainwater.</p><p>Something unspeakable, thick and viscous and black, drooling from her face, her hips, trailing down her legs.</p><p>“Please,” she says, and Grimm’s throat aches. “Please.”</p><p>The thick thorned cords of Void that bind her body tighten, and a shape that blends in with the blackness stirs behind her, rises up. Grimm is not close enough yet but he can still see it, witness every ugly detail, the skeletal claw that sinks into her torn mouth and prizes her open, bares her insides. Other hands, disembodied, reach from the dark to wrench her legs apart. At this she finally struggles, tries to twist away, but she is too weak and the grip of the many hands too firm.</p><p>A figure, small and so very familiar, materializes between her and Grimm. Their body is spoked with dripping tentacles, cruelly barbed, so much longer and thicker than life.</p><p>He does not want to see this. He cannot afford to turn away. Grimm closes the gap and swings the torch high.</p><p>“Radi,” he calls, so loud it strains his lungs and burns his throat, almost loud enough to blot out everything else. “Radi, this isn’t real. This isn’t real. This didn’t happen. Radi, listen. Concentrate on my voice. Focus on me and try to remember how it really went.”</p><p>Her gaze swims and lands on him. For one long horrible moment Grimm doesn’t think she registers him, can’t breathe for the pain of it. Then she blinks, hazy, and her eyes begin to clear.</p><p>Grimm sweeps the torch again. There’s the sharp sound of a struck match and something too painful to be relief swoops in his chest.</p><p>He pulls, pulls with his back and shoulders and an urgency that did not used to spur him, once upon a time, while he collected flame. The ghosts of red Nightmare essence flare into full visibility and Grimm churns the air until the end of his torch swells red.</p><p>Parts of the pitiful scene before him begin to flake away—revealing Radiance’s metal legs both attached, nicked by nail strikes but clean and tightly pressed together; her wings straight and unbroken. The memory of the Hollow Knight is as before, but the shadowy horror atop her melts away. In its place there is only Ghost, prying their sibling’s grasping fingers loose.</p><p>Radiance chokes. There is a thick wet sound and a gout of blood that never stop being horrible and obscene no matter how many times Grimm watches her relive them, but Ghost has pulled their sibling’s hand out of her, digging every clawtip in to prevent their resuming the rape.</p><p>The Hollow Knight swivels their head up to look Ghost in the face. Ghost shakes their head and the gesture is unmistakably clear even without words: <em>Stop.</em></p><p>“It’s over,” Grimm says, struggling for soothing even as the torch in his hands waxes fat, little red sparks dripping away. “It’s over now, Radi. You’re not there anymore. You can wake up.”</p><p>“Grimm,” she says, voice thick and distorted through her own blood. And: “Oh.”</p><p>The next moment he’s nearly dropping the lit torch, disoriented by the sudden shift from his dream form to his much smaller real body. In front of him Radi struggles into the air from where she’d been sitting in her sleep, fur on end in every direction, wings still jerking. Her eyes are wide and staring and her breath comes too fast. She’s begun to glow so strongly Grimm is forced to squint.</p><p>“You’re all right,” Unn says. She’s right beside them both but her voice seems to come from so far away. “You’re both safe right now. You made it back, you’re awake. Radi, Grimm. You’re all right.”</p><p>Grimm jabs the butt of the torch into the soft ground and flexes his fingers upon it, tries to shake himself discreetly. There is such, <em>such </em>a large part of him that wants to rush forward and embrace Radiance, press his body into hers, feel her solidness and try to ground her with his touch. It always used to comfort her before. It’s what would comfort <em>him.</em></p><p>Well. Suffice to say he’s learned better, now.</p><p>Instead of reaching for her, instead of trying to suppress the awful cramping about his stomach, Grimm backs into Unn’s flank instead—presses himself into her giving side. He takes one deep breath, tries to exhale slow, listens to her words. This is the waking world. There is no physical threat.</p><p>“Radi,” Unn is still saying, so gentle he wants to cry. “Breathe, love. We’re here. Grimm and I are here, we won’t let anything hurt you. We love you.”</p><p>Radiance shudders. Her breath has gone harsh, her eyes glassy. Her wings are fully spread with every feather fanned out, her warning glow throws every rock and leaf in the glade into violent relief, essence flickers and dissipates around her and beneath her as if to coalesce into traps and weapons. Her halo spirals at her back, blazing gold.</p><p>“We love you,” Unn says. “We’ll protect you.”</p><p>Radiance’s shoulders tense and ripple. Her eyes narrow, her light dims from scalding to merely searing, then subsides.</p><p>For just a split second her expression creases into humiliation so bitter it crumples Grimm’s heart into a ball—and then she comes to rest upon the ground, not quite touching either him or Unn, and begins to weep.</p><p>Grimm kneads at his own thorax uselessly. His arms ache so from not holding her that he can barely stand.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Sleep is a problem.</p><p>Radi needs to, desperately—she is <em>so </em>hideously deep in allostatic debt that her injuries are recovering only sluggishly, despite that she’s been free for almost three months now. She specifically needs the kind of rest that only a deep dreaming sleep can truly provide. Her body needs the leeway to repair itself and her mind needs a break.</p><p>“I’m amazed you were able to hold out until I could help,” Grimm says.</p><p>“We really weren’t,” says Radiance. Grimm is still unused to the almost-echo of her voice in his ears and in his mind.</p><p>“We did our best,” says Unn. “Things were very rough but it helped to know that you were close by and would be here as soon as you were able.”</p><p>“It sucked shit is what it did,” says Radiance. She twitches: It’s almost a shudder but too fast to properly be one, and from her seated position she extends both wings in a flick as though to shake dew from them. “I would have stayed awake the whole time if I could have.”</p><p>“Which wouldn’t have been sustainable even if you were healthy,” says Unn, with the very gentlest undertone of reprimand. And to Grimm she continues, “She would stay awake until she couldn’t, and then sleep lightly, or… usually I would have to wake her.”</p><p>“I’m sorry,” he says to both of them.</p><p>“Why are <em>you </em>apologizing,” Radiance says, her voice raising to closer to her usual volume. “You were a toddler! It would have been incredibly cruel to expect you to come help in that state.”</p><p>“Radi,” Unn says gently, but the warning comes too late: Radiance’s eyes narrow to pained slits and she goes silent.</p><p>“Should I warm up the tea?” Grimm asks.</p><p>“Better not to,” says Unn. “Early on we were told anything hotter than lukewarm will do more harm than good for a while.”</p><p>Grimm tries not to make a face: The tea in question is one Unn has made for him before, when luck isn’t with him and he has long periods of illness even before it’s time for the Ritual. It’s thick with all sorts of herbs that she promises very earnestly are nutritious as well as spurring the body to fight infection and repair itself, and this is true as far as Grimm is able to tell; only, it tastes <em>incredibly </em>vile, bitter and spicy and savory all at once. The flavor is mitigated best by heat in Grimm’s opinion, and he makes sure to drink it almost boiling when he has that option available to him.</p><p>Radiance, however, unspools her proboscis to sip at the unspeakable brew in the tea bowl without complaint. <em>Eyaugh. </em>Either it’s really helped her over the interim Grimm missed out on, or (more likely in <em>his </em>opinion) she’s overcome its noxiousness with the power of love.</p><p>“Grimm,” she says when she’s drained most of the tea. Her physical voice is near a whisper; he would not be able to catch it if she weren’t augmenting her words to speak directly into their minds. “Don’t apologize for having taken time. You’re already so much bigger than you usually are, at this point, and your health is always fragile. I would feel terrible if you had forced yourself to grow even faster, or tried to walk in dreams too young, all for my sake. It’s a comfort that you love me, but the hurt you would have caused me in hurting yourself would overshadow that comfort easily. Let it be enough that you’re here now.”</p><p>Radiance speaks sense, but that even so battered and bedraggled she feels the need to act the bigger bug all for him pierces like thorns.</p><p>Grimm opens his mouth and closes it. The things he wants to say are too muddled and he doesn’t want to distress her even more.</p><p>His disquiet must still be visible, for Unn lowers her head and gently pushes against his side with her cheek. He’s still so small right now—barely the size of an average mortal bug!—that her attempt to nuzzle nearly knocks him over, but he erupts into a purr immediately and pushes back. It’s automatic self-comfort more than anything else, but Radi relaxes just a fraction at the sound. Her eyes nearly shutter: A few moments later her whole body twitches again in a haptic jerk, and her fur stands roughly on end, forming frazzled clumps outlining half-scarred wheals and scab-caked slashes.</p><p>It’s only because he’s standing so close that Grimm can see her trembling.</p><p>Sleep is a huge fucking problem.</p><p>Grimm <em>is </em>Nightmare, so of course he has some idea of how these things work: That the mind seeks to sort out thought and emotion and information while the body rests, that fear and stress manifest in one’s dream in the same way as anything else. Especial amongst fear is trauma, and especial amongst trauma is <em>fresh </em>trauma, or the type of trauma that leaves permanent scars upon the heart. A memory too raw to simply be filed away like any other part of a bug’s past lodges like a foreign object, and the dreaming mind tries to put it away but fails, and fails, and fails.</p><p>Grimm knows this. Grimm has seen it all. Grimm has walked the world for long centuries and harvested the screaming horrors of so many dead and dying countries. He has glutted himself upon brutal atrocities without once being fazed by them—the flame of Nightmare is the blood that keeps his Heart beating strong, it is the womb that forges and births the child that becomes his next body and the one after that. He has seen rape before, seen slaughter, seen every personal cruelty; he has seen conquest, genocide, all manner of ruin. And he has seen them all again, warped and refracted a thousand million ways in the minds of victims, witnesses, perpetrators, the untouched made fearful by the world in which they live. It’s never shaken him before, never affected him like this before.</p><p>Radiance is Dream. She’s devoted so much of her existence to walking in dreams, waking or asleep; spent so much of her time tending to her children in sleep, fostering their craft, nurturing their beauty. She interwove history and art and spirituality and storytelling into sleep, controlled and cultivated expansive dreamscapes of breathtaking beauty and grandeur.</p><p>And she—that same Radi, <em>his Radi—</em>is terrified to sleep now. She avoids it until she is on the verge of collapse, and instinctively leaps awake from REM before her body and mind can truly get into any sort of repair.</p><p>She doesn’t always dream of the rape, or uglier distortions of it fueled by her other fears. But she dreams of it often enough that Grimm is very grateful for his immunity to Nightmare. It never stops being horrible in its every permutation. More than once Grimm has returned to the waking world and had to discreetly wander away to find a private place to vomit.</p><p>She doesn’t always dream of it, but the other things she dreams of are more or less the same level of horrid. And so it falls to him to walk in her nightmares, harvest their power to dull its effects, and bring her back to reality.</p><p>This in itself runs them all ragged: Radi who can barely function, Grimm who gets a graphic faceful of everything that’s hurt her and everything she fears day after day, Unn who can only support them by the sidelines.</p><p>Heaped atop this festering mound of fecal matter is Radiance’s newly minted inability to handle the dark, in any capacity whatsoever.</p><p>Naturally this makes sleep an even bigger fucking problem: Radi is wretchedly diurnal, built to be awake while her sun is in the sky and her children slept, the better to walk in their dreams. She used to sleep at night. This is now an option she hates: In any form of darkness she will begin to glow fitfully, jump at the slightest sound or movement, even try to attack the slightest imagined threat.</p><p>But to sleep in the daytime—beyond being difficult to manage because it’s not what her body is used to—necessitates being awake at night. Predictably she is not a fan of this either.</p><p>Grimm, naturally crepuscular and with a sleep schedule made malleable from traveling the whole world, is able to be there to guard Radiance’s dreams whenever she’s able to sleep, so this isn’t the disaster it <em>could </em>be. But it’s still not entirely sustainable for her to avoid sleeping until the last minute out of fear of the dark and of nightmares.</p><p>In response to this dilemma, Unn provided the glade.</p><p>It’s a very <em>Unn </em>place, she’s as devoted to her personal aesthetic as Grimm and Radiance are to theirs, but within that it definitely skews towards Radi’s tastes. Soft mosses and grasses coat the ground, and softer foliage shields the glade from the outside, along with green monoliths and signs further out warning the uninvited away. There’s water to the side, of course—deep and connected to the covered pathways Unn uses to navigate her domain in one area, shallow streams for drinking elsewhere—but it’s strewn with lily pads. Lumaflies crowd the canopy in flocks like tiny living nebulas. And furthermore there are breaks in the plant cover overhead, to allow in sunlight and starlight.</p><p>But most unique to the glade, and best for Radi’s mental equilibrium right now, is that it’s brimming with bioluminescent plants—flowers, leaves, even harmless algae. Even after nightfall the whole place brims with a gentle glow to prevent true dark from taking root.</p><p>“I’m impressed you had that many light-generating species on hand,” Grimm had said to Unn, the first time they were able to converse alone after he’d gotten the tour.</p><p>“I didn’t,” said Unn, her head turned away slightly but her eyestalks still tilted to look at him. “Over half of what’s here, I only just made up.”</p><p>He’d taken a long marveling look around the area and turned to her and said very frankly, “Unn, my sweet, I must inform you that this is perhaps the gayest thing you have ever done. You might as well have spelled out <em>I LOVE YOU </em>on the clearing floor in little flowers.”</p><p>“Shut up,” she’d told him, and retreated underwater so all that he could see was a little island of speckled green flesh and two murky blue eyes on stalks still watching him accusingly.</p><p>The safe haven definitely helps—Grimm has the nasty sense that Radi would not be able to relax even when awake, if not for Unn’s array of living nightlights—but she still can’t drop into REM without being instantly bemired in nightmares. Nor will she venture into her own realm while awake.</p><p>(“I <em>can’t—</em>I can’t, I can’t, Grimm, you can’t ask this of me. It’s still <em>there, </em>it’s still <em>in there, </em>I can <em>feel it </em>and it’s fucking horrible, I can’t—it’s, it’s, I can still feel it staining everything and it’s—I can’t go back there. <em>Please.”</em></p><p>She might have gone on in this manner, but the hysterical half-sob half-scream finally proved too strenuous for her much-abused throat. Very abruptly her proboscis unfurled, as fat as if she were drinking, and fresh blood fountained from the tip. Blood also began to leak from the scabs at her face, running thick into her fur. It’s a sight that will likely remain etched into his brain for as long as he lives.</p><p>Unn had to soothe poor Radi through this, Grimm’s shock at the gory display having frozen him in place. Afterwards he would ask her how she managed to stay calm, fearful that this simply happened <em>that </em>often; Unn looked at him and said flatly that Grimm had given both Radiance and herself plenty of practice at handling sudden blood.</p><p>He had to go lie down for a while about that.)</p><p>Time is supposed to help with such things, Grimm knows. But it’s also been <em>three months, </em>and Radiance is still—not even <em>tinder. </em>More like <em>ash.</em></p><p>He’s built to rise from his own ashes. She isn’t.</p><p>Sleep needs a better solution than what they’ve got, but… Grimm has yet to think of one.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>He returns to Dirtmouth—to the Troupe—after dawn, once Radiance has given up on any further sleep. At this point he’s the one who needs to rest, and much as he’d love to stay with his girls, they’ve both told him in no uncertain terms to go to bed. So.</p><p>Divine is in her own tent as usual, and the steeds are still asleep, folded up around each other like two little loaves. Grimm resists the urge to give them a pat just for the comfort of touch: It would wake them, and the situation with Radi has given him a new appreciation for how precious undisturbed sleep truly is.</p><p>Brumm is up, though, idly tuning his accordion. Grimm stops in the mouth of the tent, watching Brumm’s hands work, thinking that his juvenile body is just about at eye level with Brumm’s original form.</p><p>“Brumm,” he says. Brumm turns just slightly toward him.</p><p>Grimm opens his mouth. Pauses. Abruptly closes it.</p><p>“Master?” says Brumm, gentle, voice as ever sweet.</p><p>But no words can possibly encompass what Grimm wishes to express—what Brumm deserves to hear. <em>I’m sorry </em>is so paltry, even cheap. A small bandage slapped across a mortal wound. Caprice and loneliness is what led him to welcome living survivors from ruined kingdoms into his Troupe. He knew—knows, what he does to them by warping their identities, tethering them to him and to his Heart, understands he walks a razor’s edge of potential cruelty. It’s the experience of having such bugs harvest the nightmares of their own dead and dying homelands, of countries fallen to the same causes, that has never occurred to him until now.</p><p>It’s hell. It would be hell even if it didn’t force Grimm to worry about the ramifications of his own actions. Seeing his darling Radi suffer so turns his stomach and breaks his heart.</p><p>Has he—does he force this selfsame pain upon his own Troupe, his servants? Bugs he’s always thought he shelters, even if only at a whim, even if he knows he’s dangerously needy about it?</p><p>“My apologies for the interruption,” is what he says out loud. “Carry on, dear Brumm. I’m to bed.”</p><p>Brumm looks at Grimm like he knows Grimm is full of shit. Grimm walks on past Brumm, towards his own chambers.</p><p>Wouldn’t it be worse, to apologize badly, to reopen old wounds to pour salt into them all over again? Wouldn’t this start a conversation Grimm himself isn’t ready to have?</p><p>(Wouldn’t he run the risk of Brumm asking to leave, if Grimm acknowledged his own wrongdoings, put them out in the open?)</p><p>Grimm curls up in his nest of cushions and blankets and resolutely closes his eyes. There is too much on his plate already: He cannot handle this, atop everything. Radiance must take precedence over all else.</p><p><em>Coward, </em>the Heart says softly. Grimm pretends he can’t hear it.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>He hears quick footsteps tagging after him, on his way to the well, and turns.</p><p>In that moment Grimm sees them the way Radiance sees them: A squamous horror of roiling Void honed by settler avarice, violence incarnate, their father’s true heir in form and in appetite; bloody claws and a pale pitiless mask. It is only an echo of her claustrophobia that seizes his limbs, but her sob of <em>please, no more </em>is branded into his guts, and the nightmares he’s fed upon superimpose a battered woman’s animal terror upon reality. Grimm flinches: His body shrinks inwards, falls back in an automatic step.</p><p>Ghost freezes, just as automatic, and the illusion breaks. It’s only Ghost, a little less than half Grimm’s current height, arms laden with a cloth-wrapped bundle that’s nearly as large as they are.</p><p>Grimm kneels down to be on eye level with them. It hardly matters that their mask shows no emotion: The same guilt he feels is writ large in every line of their body, clear to anyone who knows them. And he knows them: Not just from Ghost’s participation in the Ritual but because they cared for the child before it was him, and cared for him across the two aching months it took for him to grow, to molt, to pupate. Creature of exquisite violence they may be, but their claws were always soft upon his larval body, and he bore witness to so many of their little kindnesses. They are the antithesis of their sibling.</p><p>“Apologies for my lapse in manners, dear Ghost,” he says, one hand over his chest. “I’m afraid this past month has proved a bit of a trial for us. I find myself rather more jumpy than usual, but that’s no excuse to treat you poorly.”</p><p>They have to set their burden upon the earth in order to reply. <em>No, it’s okay, </em>they say, the words spun in the movements of their claws. <em>I’m the one who started chasing you.</em> They look down at their feet for a moment. <em>Anyway, I don’t want to hold you up. This is for you, to give to her. Quirrel is the one who made the medicine but I helped him get the ingredients, and Hornet traded for the honey. She made the bandages too if you still need them.</em></p><p>“This is quite the boon indeed, my friend,” he says, and smiles for them. “Whatever we don’t use ourselves we’ll share with the acolytes. No, don’t leave just yet,” he appends as Ghost makes to turn. “It’s been a while since we’ve conversed, and I’ve time yet to spare.” (If he travels through flame rather than walking the long way, as he’s been doing for the past month just to enjoy sturdy lungs while he’s still got the privilege. But Ghost doesn’t need to know that part.) “Why not spend a moment to catch up, if you’re free as well? The bench has room for two.”</p><p>Ghost nods. To Grimm’s eyes they seem relieved. If this can salve the hurt he’s caused them by recoiling, it’s worth sacrificing his exercise.</p><p>They set the package on the bench first, then flit up to perch atop it. This puts them much closer to eye level with Grimm when he sits beside them, and he relaxes against the back of the bench, looking out about the town that’s regained a bit of vigor since Ghost summoned the Troupe for his latest death and rebirth.</p><p>“How goes the struggle, then, dear one?” he asks.</p><p><em>There’s so much I hardly know where to start!! </em>they say, ending the sentence by flailing their arms wide and letting them flop down onto their lap. <em>I’m glad I thought to copy down everything I could find in the lab at the White Palace before I gave you all the Dream Nail back. Without those I don’t think we could’ve figured out how to take the king’s Shade Gates down.</em></p><p>“Ah, so you’ve seen some success at those after all?”</p><p><em>It takes a lot more time than I like, </em>Ghost says, shaking their head. <em>I don’t know if there are even enough of those over the kingdom that I’ll be able to get the practice I’d need to do them quickly. That’s probably a good thing though. Hornet’s been helping me persuade… </em>Here they hesitate just a moment before tapping all their right clawtips but their thumb to their palm to sign <em>my mother to leave her gardens and come to the City of Tears instead.</em></p><p>“Unn will be incredibly grateful to you for that,” Grimm says, “and so am I, for her sake. How fares the lady Root?”</p><p>Ghost sighs. <em>It’s hard. I was hoping she’d be able to… if not take over Hallownest’s leadership, because I don’t think she ever saw anything wrong with what Hallownest was built upon, then at least help out with government. It’s only a matter of time before people notice I’ve got the king’s brand but I super extremely don’t want to be a leader. I’d be a really shitty one.</em></p><p><em>But the White Lady, my mother, she’s… she’s really not well. I think she’s going to need a lot of help before she can help other people. </em>They tap at the charm embedded in their body, pick at its edges like it’s a scab until Grimm can’t help but reach out and close his claw over theirs to stop them. Ghost breathes quick and sharp and looks up at him. They knead at his claw with both of theirs for a little while before unraveling their little digits, and Grimm shifts his now-empty claw to rest along Ghost’s back.</p><p><em>I wish I were better at helping people, </em>they say. <em>I really suck at it. I love everyone so much but it always feels like… like the only things I ever do are hurt people, and stand around uselessly while they’re already hurting.</em></p><p>“Ghost,” Grimm says kindly, “running about trying to make sure the rubble of Hallownest’s fall is livable for those bugs who’ve survived it <em>is </em>helping people. It’s helping people immensely. The wyrm bred you solely to complete the genocide he began many an age ago, and yet you still defied his directive to find a solution that spared both Radiance <em>and </em>your sibling. Even now you, your partner, and your sister put together kind gestures like <em>this </em>for her.” He taps the parcel upon which they sit. “Your heart is bigger than your sire’s old body. Don’t sell yourself short, my friend. Many a creature has benefited from your kindness.”</p><p><em>It’s nice of you to say that, </em>Ghost says, <em>but I don’t… I have a hard time feeling like that’s good enough.</em></p><p>“Most of us who’ve survived these situations feel the same,” Grimm says, but before he can add <em>so do I, </em>Ghost shakes their head and cuts him off.</p><p>
  <em>It’s my fault she wound up hurt like this, though.</em>
</p><p>“It’s the wyrm’s fault and the Hollow Knight’s,” Grimm says, calm. “Not yours.”</p><p><em>I don’t mean—I know I had nothing to do with what happened to the Moth Tribe, and that I’m not the one who locked her up, </em>Ghost goes on. <em>But the rest of it. I spent so long wishing I could help her but I gave up. I thought, well, I’ll probably have to kill her just like I had to kill the Dreamers, and so many other bugs. And I didn’t even try to—to find a way to talk to her, instead of fighting. </em>I <em>had to pick the fight with </em>her. <em>I don’t think she would have attacked me if I hadn’t, I think she was too scared.</em></p><p>Grimm tries to open his mouth to interject, but Ghost goes right on signing feverishly without pause.</p><p><em>Then when my sibling—when they, hurt her, </em>their little claws fumble and shy away from the word. <em>I saw what they meant me to do and I just—I don’t want to be the sort of bug that could help them do that. I don’t want to be a rapist and I’m tired of being a murderer. It’s harder to—to protect someone, to keep them alive than it is to let things die or kill them. And I put the effort in for Quirrel, for some of my other friends. Why couldn’t I have just done that for her too?</em></p><p>“You put a stop to it, dear Ghost,” Grimm says. His own words sound distant above the heat in his chest and the sickness in his gut. “You stopped them, prevented the incident ending in even greater tragedy.”</p><p><em>I did, </em>says Ghost, <em>but I could’ve and should’ve found a way to keep that from happening altogether. </em>Void brims at the holes in their mask. <em>I wish I’d tried harder.</em></p><p>“Ghost, my friend, I’m guiltier in this than you,” Grimm says. “I did nothing for her, nothing for Unn, so caught up was I in my own affairs. Even as my last life drew to a close, I <em>did </em>have some time to act while you were out and about. I did not. I was complacent. If you had not acted, even too late to save her from <em>some </em>harm, I would have lost my oldest and dearest friend.</p><p>“It does hurt my heart to see my Radi struggling.” He should like to have a crowd of Grimmkin to laugh at his understatement, but that would hardly help <em>this </em>situation. “But I am still grateful to have her with me, and I still have you to thank for her survival. And I thank you, too, for caring,” Grimm adds. “We only wish we could have done more because we love those we couldn’t fully protect. Thank you for loving her enough for this to pain you.”</p><p>Ghost takes a moment to wipe at their face. Grimm becomes very interested in the town, only watching them from the corner of his eye, until they raise their claws to sign again.</p><p><em>Someday when she’s feeling well enough, </em>Ghost says, <em>someday when it won’t just scare her or upset her to see me… I want to tell her personally that I’m sorry. I feel like she deserves that much.</em></p><p>“It may be a while until she feels less fragile,” Grimm tells them. (Ha, ha, says the imaginary Grimmkin crowd in the back of his mind.) “But whenever that day comes… I think she’ll appreciate what you have to say.”</p><p>Ghost turns fully to face him, holds their right claw flat and digits together near where their mouth would be if they had one, and swings their arm down from the elbow. Then they launch themself from atop their package into Grimm’s lap, and he holds them as tightly as they hold him.</p><p>Something deep in his chest aches and eases at the hug. Grimm allows himself to linger.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>He swings by the camp briefly, on his way to the glade. Part of it’s just so he can report to the girls, as Unn is always at Radi’s side and Radi is afraid to leave; part of it’s a curiosity his conversation with Ghost has stoked.</p><p>Radiance’s converts, her new faithful, inhabit a small settlement near the glade’s edge that despite having existed for three months remains stubbornly temporary, largely lean-tos and tents. To Grimm’s understanding this is because a good half of Radi’s adopted children, so to speak, are the mantises who broke with their kinfolk to accept her power and attack Hallownest. Their previous encampment was, from his memories accompanying Ghost through it, makeshift by mantis standards also.</p><p>But none of the mantises show any discomfort at their rough housing. Passing through, Grimm espies pairs and trios of them curled up asleep together upon their tent floors, and in a few cases in hammocks strung between greenery or stonework. Others go about their business, paying him little mind but for a bow or two: Here one measures a youth for a new cloak; there another sits at a whetstone sharpening the hooked climbing tools their kind prefer. And towards the center of the camp, a few mantises sit by a large cookpot, preparing ingredients to add to a stew one of the mosskin stirs gently.</p><p>Past the little gaggle of cooks a tarp ceiling has been pitched between one of the whorled stone formations and a makeshift wall of branches: Beneath it lies a long metal box he still thinks looks rather tomblike, and stretched out in it with her chin upon the lip is the Seeker who arrived in the crater from afar.</p><p>She looks a bit less sorry than she did in Grimm’s memories of her, traveling with Ghost as a larva: Most of this, he thinks, is due to her now wearing clothes that fit rather than being stuck in armor and a cape that she outgrew by far in her recent molt. His neck hurts less to observe her, at least. The sight of her is still sorry overall, though; a bug retreating into its cocoon to self-comfort isn’t exactly an indication of good mental health.</p><p>But near the Seeker sits a small pill bug, the lone Hallownest creature who’s joined Radiance’s retinue permanently. With the Seeker’s box lid as her bench, she uses her claws to comb through the grassy coat of the large mosskin who now serves as Radi’s high prophet, humming all the while.</p><p>The prophet themself appears to be in danger of melting beneath their little friend’s ministrations, sagged down upon the soft ground with their eyes shut in happiness. Perhaps mimicking Radiance’s children, they wear no mask; this gives them an extraordinary resemblance to some sort of small bush or shrub. Grimm remembers seeing them sickly and shuddering beneath the weight of tumorous growths, when he traveled with Ghost. The bug was nearly at death’s door when Ghost gave the prophet one of the holy flowers Ghost got so keen on passing around, towards the end of things, but now they are healthy. Rather than having returned to a perfectly unblemished state when Radi was freed, though, in every spot her power burnt their body there now blooms an extraordinarily puffy white flower.</p><p>Grimm hasn’t seen any other bugs growing foliage over their tumor scars. Maybe it’s simply the prophet’s position amongst Radiance’s converts that’s attained them this unique boon. He’d have to ask Radi or Unn about it to learn for sure, if either of them even understands the phenomenon; this means he’s certainly not going to get an answer to his question for a while. The girls’ plates are rather full just with taking care of Radi, right now.</p><p>“O Dream-Walker,” says the Seeker (quite startling Grimm, who didn’t realize she was awake or paying attention), “dost thou bring Us tidings of She most brilliant, Our resplendent Lady, holiest among holy, God of Gods?”</p><p>Alone amongst her garments, her mask is too small for her head, but she’s never taken it off in Grimm’s presence. As a Higher Being he can sense its age; perhaps that is why she still clings to it alone. A remnant of some happier time, perhaps, if not for her then for some distant ancestor. The memory of his once-upon-a-time wishes to turn back the clock and have his cheerful Radi back curls bitter at the nape of Grimm’s neck: He can’t fault the Seeker if his guess is true.</p><p>The comparatively tiny mask is out of place with the rest of her bulk, though; the overall effect is comical and disconcerting in turns. Especially with her deep voice and nebulous grasp upon the local language.</p><p>“Greetings to you, Seeker,” Grimm says, bowing shallowly. “Alas, the only tidings I bring are that the situation remains the same. I am afraid this will take some time. Don’t resent her for it. She’s been hurt terribly.”</p><p>“Resent Her! Us!” cries the Seeker, at such a volume heads turn throughout the camp. She raises her upper body, long slender claws grasping at the lip of the box. “Never! Thou doth insult Us! Resent She who took Us into Her fold after ages wandering! She who provides Us with hearth and succor! <em>Resent </em>Our Radiant One!!”</p><p>“Well, it’s certainly good to know you don’t,” says Grimm, who finds this rather over the top even by his standards. “I doubt I shall have any news of note for you for a good while, however. If you can’t sense changes by grace of your attunement, perhaps you can rely upon your Prophet for day to day updates.”</p><p>The Seeker shrinks back to resume her former position. “O woe,” she says. “We do not intend offense, God of Nightmare, God of Flame. We beg thine forgiveness for Our behavior. It is merely…”</p><p>Here, though, she falls silent; the tips of her claws slip back under the lip of the box as she rests her chin upon it. Grimm waits another beat, but she doesn’t finish her thought.</p><p>“It’s ok-k-kay,” the little pill bug says suddenly, swiveling from her task to face the Seeker. “We’re here to keep each other c-company while we wait! You should t-teach me more songs later, haha, it’s hard to b-be lonely when you sing, especially when everyone’s singing all together. It’s fine!”</p><p>“The dawn has broken after so many timeless years,” says the prophet, opening their eyes and straightening up. They look more like a little bush than ever. “So shall our Radiant One rise! And as her devout, we wait. Ash nourishes the soil, but it takes the Green time to grow back from a wildfire—the Ever-Burning knows this well,” they say, looking directly at Grimm, which puts his hackles up just a bit.</p><p>But, “This is so,” says Grimm. “Just be patient.”</p><p>“We shall wait,” says the Seeker. “We shall not—ask for more than We ought.”</p><p>There is a particular burr as though at the back of her throat as she speaks these words. If her fellows hear it they don’t show any sign of doing so, but the song is abominable to Grimm in its familiarity, so he nods his head to the trio of converts and walks on towards the glade at a deliberately slow pace, so no one should mistake him for doing what he truly is—fleeing.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>“You came here through the camp, didn’t you?” asks Radi with interest when Grimm has made his daily greetings. “How are they faring?”</p><p>He should have circled around or teleported and come from a different direction. He would have, if he’d realized Radiance is with it enough to pay attention to where things are in the glade—though it’s heartening to know she’s able and willing to keep track.</p><p>“They’re doing well for themselves, for a group of bugs just roughing it,” Grimm says, keeping his voice light. “I helped persuade your Seeker to, ah, be more patient.”</p><p>Even that appended sentence was too much: Radi’s eyes narrow to golden slits and the fur of her back ripples as she pulls her wings tighter about her body. Unn turns her head to face Radiance in the quiet, and Grimm holds his breath.</p><p>“I’ve not been a very good god,” says Radiance at length.</p><p>“Radi, <em>no,” </em>Grimm begins. She stretches out one wing, feathers held up. He closes his jaws with a click but isn’t happy about it.</p><p>“They aren’t—I can’t think of them as my children,” she says haltingly. Her wings buzz and she levers herself up with care. Unn watches her quietly, face betraying nothing; Grimm beholds the butchery of Radi’s body and wants to set something ablaze. “That’s probably more than cruel enough. But that I cannot be with them, speak with them. Especially the Seeker. I know better than anyone else in this world what it’s like to be so alone for so long—to hurt for safety, for companionship, for a kind touch.</p><p>“And yet even after all the time I’ve spent hurting for the same, I can’t give it to her. What is the <em>point,” </em>she cries suddenly, a normal tone spoken aloud and a shout in Grimm’s head, “of a Higher Being that can do nothing for her followers?”</p><p>She doesn’t keep talking, so there’s at least no sudden fount of gore, but she also doesn’t sit back down. Her feathers flex continually and she stares at the plant life in the opposite direction of the camp, over the hill of Unn’s back.</p><p>There’s a particular nightmare that Radiance has off and on, meaning Grimm has seen it about six or seven times. It goes like this:</p><p>She is at the edge of the wastes and it is dark. Her light is fading like a candle about to burn out and she is surrounded by her children. Sometimes they are ghosts, flickering translucent; sometimes they are still-bloody corpses, missing limbs and wings and half their heads. Sometimes they are alive and whole.</p><p>And when Radiance begs them to stay, they look at her and they say, why did you do nothing? Why did you not fight for us, why did you not save us? Why do you still call yourself our mother, when you would not even act?</p><p>Sometimes she tries to explain herself—that she did try, she did everything she could. Other times she just repeats over and over that she’s sorry, or simply breaks down and cries.</p><p>One by one the moths turn away from her and walk into the bottomless throat of the darkness surrounding them.</p><p>Don’t go, she says as her light fades. Please don’t go. Don’t leave me. You’ll die. All of us, we’ll all die.</p><p>But they keep turning their backs on her, saying things like, We’ve lived as orphans for long enough, or, We’re already long dead, and since when has that mattered to you?</p><p>Every nightmare Radi has is the worst, for its own particular rubric of awfulness. This one may not make Grimm physically ill to behold, but—it’s one of the hardest to wake her from, and the hardest by far to convince her isn’t true even once she’s woken.</p><p>“Radi, darling,” he says against helplessness like a monsoon, “our station doesn’t change the fact that we are <em>people. </em>You need to heal as a person more before you can take on all the responsibilities you bore once, as mother and teacher and heart of the Dream. All of these bugs who’ve gathered to you know that. They’ll wait for you until you can be their god.” Or else Grimm, in particular, will know why.</p><p>“We can’t just <em>not be gods, </em>numbnuts,” Radiance says tartly, not looking at him. Her hackles are all up. “I didn’t stop being the fucking <em>sun </em>when the Vessel raped me.”</p><p>“That’s not what I’m trying to say,” Grimm pleads. He looks to Unn, who’s been silent all this time, her mouth peaked into a small frown.</p><p>“I think,” Unn says, “you <em>should </em>try seeing them.”</p><p>This gets Radi to turn, even as Grimm <em>stares.</em></p><p>“In very, very small doses only,” Unn continues. “Starting with just one who we can agree will be low-key. An audience of five minutes or so, every few days. You can worry about taking more time with them, seeing more individuals separately or in groups, or meeting them more frequently once you’ve been able to handle it consistently, and we know it’s not causing too much stress.”</p><p>“I’m surprised by how sensible that is,” Grimm says; at the same time Radiance says, “But will that be <em>enough?”</em></p><p>“Listen,” Unn says. “When the worm and the root came to our lands and they took half of my Greenpath, I was too shocked and too hurt to fight them. My children suffered but I failed to act, because I was afraid, and then I secluded myself over my own cowardice. I let terrible things happen to myself and my land and my children because I felt I deserved it, and then I isolated myself as punishment, and isolated myself further as punishment for neglecting my relationships with my people and with you. Radi, after you left, when I realized what you were doing—I remembered your warning and I tried to call the Green Children back to my dream. And when no one answered I assumed they’d all abandoned me for being such a worthless caretaker. It didn’t even occur to me to go look outside and see if there was something preventing them coming to me. If the little Vessel hadn’t wandered into my hiding place, and if you two hadn’t come back, I would have simply curled up and slept until I died.</p><p>“To be a god is to be a black hole of need,” Unn goes on, simply and calmly. “As Higher Beings we feed on belief but as people we feed on <em>interaction. </em>It’s easy for that to lapse if you let it, and once you’ve begun to cut yourself off because you feel like you don’t deserve to have that, it starts to feel insurmountable. This is the advice I would give my past self if I could—no, these are the rules I would <em>enforce </em>for my past self, because I know what she needed and so did she, and she wouldn’t pursue it left to herself.</p><p>“I don’t know if this is the best solution for you,” she continues, looking steadfast at Radiance. This is the most words Grimm has heard Unn say in a row for longer than he can remember. “But we can try it starting tomorrow if you want to.” She tilts her head slightly to the side, eyestalks swaying a quarter beat late. “I think that maybe… even if you’re never able to think of your new followers as your children, the first step should still be to start building a relationship. Does that sound fair?”</p><p>“Unn,” says Radiance, choked with some emotion that burns too bright for Grimm to regard it head on. “I—”</p><p>She cuts herself off and sways the tip of her left wing forward. Freezes. Grimm holds his breath, doesn’t dare to blink. Unn doesn’t move, just watches Radiance with unwavering calm. Radi’s feathers are trembling so minutely Grimm wouldn’t see it if he didn’t know her so well. Her chest rises and sinks with her breath, and her down puffs up, but she follows through, and the feathertips trace brief along the side of Unn’s cheek. Unn colors faintly. Grimm’s chest has begun to hurt, but he still holds his breath, afraid to shatter the moment should he exhale noisily. Radiance doesn’t pull her wing away. As if handling sugarglass she spreads her feathers out, skates the trembling digits so as to cup Unn’s face in full. Unn leans minutely, pressing gentle against the palm of the wing. And Radi shakes like a dry leaf but doesn’t pull away. It is the first time she has touched another living creature of her own volition since she was freed.</p><p>Grimm coughs, unable to hold his breath any longer. Unn whips her head around as though she forgot he was there (rude!); Radi squeaks like a grub and flails, and the air around her boils with deadly spheres of concentrated light.</p><p>Quite embarrassed, he holds up his claws. Unn clears her throat and pointedly looks at no one. Radiance’s fur still stands out so she looks twice her size, but she banishes the menacing light balls.</p><p>“Anyway, ah,” Grimm says, attempting for bright to smooth the awkwardness over, “I think your plan is a lovely one, Unn dear. If I may ask, though… why begin tomorrow specifically, and not today?”</p><p>“Well,” Unn says. “Er. Radi, unless you have someone specific in mind, the camp might want time to come up with nominees. And… we have to check on her wounds today, Grimm. I thought… well, that might be too overwhelming to want to do much besides.”</p><p>“Oh, damn,” says Grimm, who’d momentarily forgot; “Mother<em>ffffucker,” </em>mutters Radi, who it appears forgot also.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>“Radi, love,” Grimm says, as he always does, “tell me to stop as <em>soon </em>as you get overwhelmed. As long as I’m not in the middle of something <em>very </em>delicate I’ll stop right away, and if I am in the middle of something I can’t stop, I’ll do so right afterward. We can take as many breaks as you need.”</p><p>“Right,” says Radiance instead of sassing him for repeating his spiel.</p><p>“Have you any preference for where we begin?” he prompts.</p><p>“Anything that isn’t—you know.”</p><p>He does. “I’ll start from your chest, then, and work from there.”</p><p>She takes a deep breath. Where Grimm might close his eyes, Radiance stares and stares as though she might bore a hole in him. Used to this after a month, he reaches to part her fur with careful claws, and leans in to inspect her shell.</p><p>This particular cut, a nail strike from Ghost, has almost completely scarred over by now: A relief, even though it <em>has </em>taken three fucking months where it ought to have required only a week or two. Grimm runs only the pad of his thumb along the scar, asking “Does this hurt? And this?” all the while, attention as rapt on the temperature of her flesh as the consistent replies of <em>no.</em> There is some palpable warmth near the top of the cut, where the blade would have entered her body, and near the middle where the wound would have been deepest; these spots are still a little raw. But they aren’t discolored and show no other signs of infection.</p><p>Grimm and Unn have accumulated three separate kinds of medicine for this business, and for this wound Grimm selects the lightest, a thin and largely scentless cream to rub into the scar to encourage the carapace to heal clean. Grimm keeps Radiance’s fur and down parted as gently as he can and works as swiftly as he dares against the need to cover every part of the mostly-healed cut, both the broadest part of the scar tissue and every trailing hairline where impact cracked her shell. Even so there is such tension in her body from bearing the unwelcome contact that she quivers. Grimm croons high in his throat but this does not seem to have any reassuring effect.</p><p>Done administering the cream, Grimm gives Radiance’s down one last cursory brush away from her scar to help prevent it from getting stuck to the sensitive flesh. The fluff beneath his digits may not be matted or tangled, but it’s still visibly unkempt. His claws, his forearms ache just to look at it.</p><p>Grimm takes a deep breath and moves on to the next wound.</p><p>Most of the ones on Radiance’s upper torso are healing well, if slowly; are well on their way to becoming scars even if large chunks of them are still scabbed. But the scabbed sections require the thicker antibiotic jelly, and every time Grimm puts any pressure on the scabs Radiance’s body goes tauter. She hasn’t asked him to stop yet, but Grimm feels translucent with watching her—or like he’s grown a pelt to match hers, every imaginary hair straining to sense the slightest change in the air around her. It is hard to travel with a musician and not absorb osmotically the early warning signs of an instrument with a string drawn too tightly, about to snap.</p><p>So he pulls back first, once he’s explored the breadth of her chest. Radi takes a deep breath and exhales. She does not truly <em>relax </em>but she does look slightly less like a cornered aspid, which is good, because Grimm has a healthy dislike of getting blasted.</p><p>“Shall we take a moment?” he asks, attempting at light. She nods and flicks her wings. Pain or fear has her stiff-shouldered and Grimm shakes himself in a roll from nose to toes in shuddery sympathy, body suddenly oversensitive.</p><p>“You’re doing well,” Grimm says. “Almost <em>too </em>well. Give yourself a little breathing room, Radi darling. There’s no ceiling on breaks and you’ve already decided on a big step to take tomorrow. Be careful of overextending today.”</p><p>Radiance rolls her wings again, extending jittering feathers. She looks to Unn just briefly, and Unn dips her head in response; Radiance pokes at the curve of Unn’s cheek <em>so </em>timidly with a feathertip that Grimm can’t tell if there was actually any contact or if Radi pulled back at the last second. He clamps down a little harder on the boiling thing in his gut. Grits his jaw. Turns to pull the heaviest-duty ointment within easy reach. No matter what part of her he tends to next, it’s going to be in a sorrier state than the cuts across her chest: He’s approaching the parts of Radi’s body she’s less tolerant of being manhandled, after all.</p><p>“Do you have a preference of what to do next?” he asks aloud. “Or would you rather I decide? We can take a longer rest, too, if you need one.”</p><p>“Do <em>you </em>need a break?” Radiance asks, so sharp he startles. “Your color seems poor right now, Grimm.”</p><p>He raises his head to find both the girls looking at him, and has to let his gaze swim away from their stares before he can even begin to muster a response.</p><p>“I know you’re stepping up to answer my need,” she goes on, a bit more careful: “and I don’t intend to deny that I do need you. But your body is very young, for you to shoulder quite so much.”</p><p>“It’s only because my body’s this young that I can take risks,” Grimm says, gentle. “If I were bigger, I wouldn’t be able to trust I could bounce back.”</p><p>“You can still overextend to the point you injure yourself,” Unn says. “None of the people who love you want that.”</p><p>“I also know I—don’t make this easy for you,” Radiance says. “I’ll tell you when I know I need to rest. So that you can relax in the knowledge you’re treating a grown adult who understands you’re trying to help, and not an animal that might bite you.”</p><p>“I do appreciate that, Radi dear,” says Grimm. “And I hope you know that I won’t hold it against you if you do, metaphorically, bite.” Not that it won’t <em>hurt. </em>She’s well and truly taught herself how to hit, and hits like a speeding tram. This is unfun to receive should a blow connect and a bit jarring and/or saddening when he thinks about the Radiance of old with her rigid scruples, but also oddly reassuring too.</p><p>“Thanks for that,” she says in a tone that makes it difficult to tell whether she’s being sincere or sarcastic. Here something softens about her eyes. “But, Grimm. If there’s anything <em>I </em>can reasonably do to make this easier for <em>you, </em>let me know. There are some things I still—cannot truly control. But you’re trying to help me and I don’t need to make that any harder on you.”</p><p>He opens his mouth and then closes it.</p><p>“You’ve made it obvious that there <em>is </em>something you’ve thought of,” Unn says. “Grimm, sweetheart, this is not the time for restraint. Radi is <em>asking </em>you, she can say no if she thinks it’s unreasonable. If you try to deflect any more I’m going to have to sit on you.”</p><p>“At which I’ll then laugh until I rip my throat open probably,” says Radiance. “I know <em>drama </em>is your middle name, dear, but spare us from it this time.”</p><p>“Shush,” he tells them both, scowling. “I’m trying to think.”</p><p>“Oh, we <em>must </em>reward him then,” Radiance says cheerily, which is rude, but which Grimm also decides he shall let stand because this is how they used to gently take the piss out of one another, such a long long time ago. The love in her words is sunlight on a clear and breezy day: Perfectly warm. He wants to curl up in it.</p><p>The problem is that he knows he’s being stupid, and selfish besides. Of course it’s Unn she’s reached out to first: Unn <em>knows </em>her pain where Grimm can only sympathize. Radi <em>loves </em>him, but she’s not <em>in love with </em>him. And Grimm is the one to whom it falls to trample her boundaries in the name of medical necessity, and on top of all the rest of it he is a small black bug with a white face. It makes sense. He understands. He can’t <em>not </em>understand: He and Radiance have been together for so long, grew up in each other’s cursed pockets; the deep understanding of someone you can only get by watching them grow and change and seeing the parts that stay the same burns in his mind with a heat so ruthless it’s freezing.</p><p>And yet there’s still the squalling grub deep inside Grimm’s mind that boils him up in heartburn-sour pettiness: <em>It’s not fair, it’s not fair, it’s not fair; why choose </em>her <em>over </em>him? <em>When he’s the one who’s known her longest, when he’s the one who stayed with her when Unn went catatonic under the weight of her own self-loathing!</em></p><p>Then, beneath all of <em>that, </em>the kernel of burnt-child idiocy he’s been worrying like a loose fang since they split their realms: <em>She and Unn are finally getting together and so now she’ll have no more use for me.</em></p><p>And the thing is that Grimm <em>knows </em>he’s being stupid. He’s tested Radi’s patience with him in <em>so </em>many thoughtless, even hurtful ways in the past; it’s made her incandescently angry with him and earned him many scalding lectures from her or from Unn about getting a better grip on his all-consuming need for attention, nothing more. (There is nothing like getting read the riot act on stupid shit one did <em>just because </em>by someone whose brain is on fire the same way, whose personality was warped exactly the same by an identical upbringing, yet generally has a better handle on her problems. Getting read the riot act for one’s poor impulse control, attention-seeking behavior, et cetera by <em>two </em>people with the same problems as oneself should qualify as a form of torture.) She did not throw him out on his ear after the time he fucked the pale wyrm and his rootly wife out of pure capriciousness, and if their relationship managed to survive <em>that </em>bout of idiocy, there’s no way Radiance would ever be done with Grimm over something as little as getting a <em>girlfriend. </em>And Grimm himself has been haranguing Radi <em>and </em>Unn over their mutual stupidity re: each other for <em>centuries.</em></p><p>This knowledge does not quell the squalling or the paranoia. His body is too young yet to allow him to go fuck someone inadvisable over this, so: All Grimm knows to do is self-immolate about it. But <em>no, </em>of course his girls know him too well and love him too much to allow that.</p><p>“Grimm,” Radiance says very gently.</p><p>He squinches his eyes shut, inhales deep, and huffs the breath back out. “It’s simply that—Radi, my love, I want to hold you, but I know that’s too much to ask right now and will still be too much to ask for a long time. May I propose to you a compromise, if that’s not too uncomfortable for you?”</p><p>“You can certainly <em>ask,” </em>she says, “and I can think about it.”</p><p>Grimm opens his eyes, regards Radiance and Unn both looking at him. “Would you touch me, please, dear? However and wherever you’re comfortable with—I’ll just stand here, I’ll keep my claws to myself. And if this is too much for today… may I ask the same thing of you again, once a few more days have passed?”</p><p>He’s bracing himself for a quick brush-off or Radiance laughing off what a big deal he’s made of something that sounds so <em>simple, </em>but she considers him for a long moment, tilting her body a little to the side and narrowing her eyes just slightly.</p><p>“I—can’t promise,” she says, pitched up with nerves. “But I can try.” A pause. “And we can try again, too.”</p><p>Grimm nods. Powerful emotion geysers up throughout his carapace, so intense his claws tremble with it.</p><p>Softly Radiance reaches out. Her feathers shake much more visibly than Grimm does, and for an unbearable moment that lasts for myriads she stays frozen with her wing half outstretched. All he can do is lock his muscles to prevent himself diving into the curve of her wing before she’s ready, and count the barbs in each quivering feather.</p><p>At last she closes the distance, as though parting a veil with great effort. Radiance cups Grimm’s face, most of Grimm’s body, in silken gray.</p><p>The purr that erupts from him is like unto the roar of a machine and startles the shit out of all three of them, but Radi in her infinite kindness and restraint neither kneejerk skewers him nor drops him. Helpful, as he’s listed into her touch like a magnet. She runs the tip of one feather back and forth across the top of his head and Grimm begins to laugh even as something hot and salty runs down his face.</p><p>Unn’s soft nose presses into his back and Grimm nuzzles weakly into Radiance’s wing. He is drunk on the relief of it: The long-missed sensation buzzes through his brain so that it is indistinguishable from being high. Laughing and crying and purring, he sounds like he’s gargling rocks and glass together, yet he can’t bring himself to care.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Naturally it is this which proves to be their collective downfall.</p><p>After this emotional display the three of them take a sojourn for tea—Unn’s medicinal mess again, as Radiance decides to put the honey off for after Grimm’s through checking her injuries, and besides that diluting honey with water and nectar so she can drink it even in her weakened state is a time-consuming task. And it is only after they’ve relaxed and given Radi’s nerves a break that Grimm leaps back into the fray.</p><p>“Shall we just get the worst out of the way right now?” Grimm asks.</p><p>“We may as well,” Radiance says, and sighs.</p><p>He is doubly careful pushing the fur away at her right shoulder, but she still hisses in warning whenever his clawtips brush the wounds, and she’s started to bristle. Grimm schools his face to placidity with the long practice of a performer so as not to agitate her—but he wants to hiss and bristle too.</p><p>The nail wounds are all across her front, but the injuries about her shoulders circle the whole base of her wings. They tell a tale that would be sordid even if Grimm didn’t regularly get a faceful of Radiance’s flashbacks: The Void tentacles that pinned her were not gentle, applying enough pressure to fracture her shell. Atop this the things were barbed, and their thorns pierced her in many places. Unn has assured him more than once that the shattered bits of her shell that got caught in the wounds were all safely removed: From her haunted stare when she said so and Radiance adding that her own memories of this are a muddle, Grimm is inclined both to believe this and believe that however this was managed, it was gruesome.</p><p>The partly-healed wounds are still, if he may be frank, <em>pretty fucking gruesome. </em>The carapace scabbed over the cuts and in between cracks is membrane-thin and swollen and hot beneath Grimm’s palms. It is also translucent, which is gross, but which at least allows Grimm to see that the gray blood underneath is not mottled with pus; the wounds only smell like blood and stress. It might eventually become necessary to open the scabs up strategically to relieve the pressure and get some more antibiotic medicine straight into Radi’s flesh, but he would rather wait and see if there’s any improvement for a little longer, for the sake of her mental equilibrium. There’s still no sign of infection, so at least there’s that.</p><p>Then there is her face.</p><p>Even after all her resolve, even though this is routine, Radiance still shies when Grimm stretches up on tiptoe and stretches out one palm. He wants to weep. Though he can suppress tears, he cannot stop himself from fitfully purring—the instinctive need to self-comfort is too intense.</p><p>“I know,” he says, words coming out garbled through the rumble of his thorax. “I know, I know. Oh, Radi. Radi-radi, I’m so sorry.”</p><p>“Please get it over with fast,” she says with her mind rather than her voice. Her tone does not bear describing.</p><p>But he cannot get it over with fast, because her face is a mess.</p><p>Radi’s jaws are vestigial: Her mouthparts are just—just her proboscis and the velvety black palps that surround it. When the Hollow Knight ripped her face open, they cracked her carapace <em>all the way open, </em>their hand went deeper into her mouth and throat over a wider area than anything is physically supposed to go. If Radiance were not a Higher Being, if she had not gotten first aid to sew her face back up within those first few touch-and-go hours, she might have died from this injury alone.</p><p>Maybe it’s just because this is her head, and therefore especially delicate; maybe it’s the severity of the wound, maybe it’s that the rape forced pure Void into her system, anathema for any creature of Light. Grimm personally thinks it is all of this as well as the fact that Radiance can only stand even him getting this close to her for about half a minute at a time at most: The cuts have scabbed over, but very poorly. They are warmer than even the swollen wheals circling Radiance’s shoulders, and through the gossamer scabs what Grimm can see of her flesh and blood is mottled in a way he does not like. And the heavy antibiotic medicine he must attempt to smear over and work into these wounds is sharp and chemical and stings, so, Radi flinches throughout and cries <em>Stop </em>every fifteen to twenty seconds.</p><p>This would be a lot easier if she were just willing to take out her arms and get a mirror and do this part for herself, Grimm can’t help but think. This is a very cruel thought to have, he knows, about someone this deep in crisis. It would be terribly unkind to press her into making herself vulnerable in a whole new way just to make this part of her treatment more convenient.</p><p>(Once upon a time Grimm could stop her fussing or panicking like this just by cupping her cheek in his palm. Radiance may never be able to tolerate being touched that way again.)</p><p>Anyway, he has to work fast, so he does not get as clear a look as she would give him of her torso or even her shoulders, and the wounds are too sensitive for him to be able to really work the salve in <em>quite </em>as surely as he ought. Really she ought to have her face seen to <em>every </em>day instead of every few days: They are toeing a fine line. Grimm tries with all his heart to be happy that she’s bearing even this much, instead of stabbing everyone who gets near her and getting the gangrene.</p><p>Breaks counted, Radi’s head takes Grimm a good twenty minutes to go over, all told. Both he and she are left floppy and exhausted from the tension afterwards; Unn lowers herself flat to the ground too, perhaps in solidarity. It is another half hour before Grimm levers himself back up, sighing.</p><p>“Your shoulder isn’t going to look at itself, Radi darling. May I?”</p><p>She makes a long-suffering noise and lifts herself into the air. Unn stays down; Grimm clambers up onto her soft back for this part.</p><p>Compared to Radiance’s face, this shoulder goes well—it’s in the same state as its twin, not healing as well as her nail wounds but still doing much better than her facial wounds. Then there is the scattering of cuts across her abdomen, which are well on their way to healing and only a source of tension because she does not want anyone’s claws anywhere in the remote vicinity of her genitals right now and even this severely pushes the envelope.</p><p>And that would have been the end of it—Grimm’s self-indulgence would not have been a problem—if he had not taken a look at Radiance still floating in midair instead of sitting down and said, “When’s the last time you’ve taken your legs off?”</p><p>Unn goes tense underneath him. Radiance freezes and stares at him in wide-eyed animal panic.</p><p>“I don’t… it’s probably been a while,” she says, slowly, faltering.</p><p>Across this Unn cuts with: “She hasn’t. Not once while I’ve been taking care of her.”</p><p>There is a very long, very bad silence.</p><p>“Slipped my mind,” Unn says. “I should’ve thought of this.”</p><p>“No,” Grimm says, sliding down her side. “This isn’t your fault, you had so much to worry about. Radi, love… just leave them off for a few hours, all right? Your legs are probably bruised all to fuck. We have bandages here, when it’s time to put your prosthetics back on I can pad them for a while so they won’t hurt you.”</p><p>The silence that follows <em>this </em>is longer and badder. “I don’t—want to,” Radiance says, and all her fur is standing on end, her wings stretched out with every feather fanned.</p><p>“I don’t even have to look at your legs right away,” Grimm wheedles. “Unn and I will keep our distance. You <em>know </em>you need to give your body a rest.”</p><p>“You’re hurt, aren’t you,” Unn says, low and soft and hopeless.</p><p>Radi winces. “Unn, it’s not—it’s not bad.”</p><p>“It will get worse if you don’t take a break,” Unn says. “I’m sorry. I should have remembered and pressed you on this sooner.”</p><p>“It’s not <em>your </em>fault,” Radiance says, wheeling awkwardly in midair.</p><p>“Ladies,” Grimm interrupts, spreading his palms to look as reasonable as he can. “Allow me to judge how <em>bad </em>it is for myself, Radi dear. Unn darling, it doesn’t help anyone to blame yourself. What’s done is done. The sooner we can get this over with, Radi, the sooner you can put your legs back on, and you’ll be spared our nagging and fussing. All right?”</p><p>Radiance looks as mutinous as a grub told to eat a hated food, and also as though she’s strongly considering fleeing. But she lowers herself in achingly tiny increments to the soft ground, and the silver prostheses glimmer off into essence.</p><p>And. Well. Grimm’s stomach rolls.</p><p>Her left leg truly <em>isn’t </em>so bad. It is visibly bruised, Grimm can see the blush of blood through her carapace, but nothing more than that. The problem is the right: The abbreviated stump of her thigh is ringed in a thick garter of bright swollen sores. The one across the top, the biggest, is visibly abscessed; even at a distance the stink of pus is unmistakable.</p><p>He wants to scream at her—she couldn’t have been unaware, she should have said something—but he takes a deep, deep breath and tries to let it go. Radiance has been so frightened this whole time. She hates to take her legs off if she’s already feeling vulnerable. In order to hide it, and keep wearing the prosthesis, despite the amount of pain it’s doubtless caused her…</p><p>Grimm closes his eyes and takes another deep, deep breath. “Well, you’ll probably be able to put the left one back on after a few hours’ break,” he says, as gently as he possibly knows how, “but I think the right will need to stay off for a few days, perhaps. And—you know we have to drain that.”</p><p>Radiance closes her eyes silently and slumps where she sits.</p><p>“I can help you this time, Grimm,” Unn says.</p><p>“I thank you,” Grimm tells her. His claws do not shake. “Radi, I’m sorry, this is going to hurt a bit.”</p><p>It is a testament to her character that she does not blast them both just for inserting themselves into her personal space, after all the finicky checking Grimm just did of her other wounds. It is a shining monument to her great kindness and restraint that all she does when Grimm lifts up the offending leg is to breathe in tightly. She flinches when Unn pulls pure water, hot and acidic, to sluice over the sores.</p><p>This is as far as Radiance’s dignity makes it. Grimm slices the carapace open and she <em>screams.</em></p><p>Her scream isn’t the frightened squeak of a grub, not the yelp of a beast in pain: It is all the holy fear and wrath of a god imprisoned. It is <em>exactly </em>the way she screamed still trapped in the Hollow Knight’s body and mind, except that it is not issued from behind a sealed door and through the dubious anatomy of a Vessel born without vocal cords. It is decibels of mindless panic enough to make Grimm’s head ring.</p><p>Unn washes pus and rotten blood from the wound and Radiance screams; Grimm expands the cut and squeezes at the edges of the sore to drain it faster and she screams. He opens the next sore and she screams. There is a sick wet sound from deep in her throat and she chokes and expels blood wet and gray all over her chest, and she coughs and keeps screaming. Grimm cuts again; there is another brief rinse as hot as the pus and blood. Radiance twists and thrashes and glows so bright Grimm can’t see his own claws in front of him for long moments. There is the swift and ugly impact of nail through earth: The strike missed him easily but Grimm’s heart still jumps in his chest. He picks broken bits of carapace away, scrapes something sticky and congealed from the largest abscess with his claws. Radiance <em>shrieks </em>until her voice breaks: Blood runnels down her chest in swift founts like it’s projectile vomit, and she struggles as though she expects him to bite her throat out.</p><p>Even weak and sick Radiance fights like a roomful of primal aspids, but there is only one of her and she is too out of her mind with fear and pain to struggle effectively. Grimm folds up spidersilk bandages to blot away fluid and lets Unn give the cuts another rinse, works eye-burningly strong antibiotic gel into the wounds, washes his hands off, and winds loops of sticky white bandage about Radiance’s thigh, clinging with arms and legs to keep her still enough. She is coughing more than screaming now but it is not for lack of effort on her part, and where she cannot scream with her throat anymore she makes do with her mind. Grimm does not know how anyone in Hallownest could even attempt to ignore this.</p><p>At last he severs the bandage and steps back to give Radiance space. Unn carefully noses her into a forward lean, so when Radi coughs the blood goes out over her chest instead of back down into her lungs.</p><p>Grimm observes mildly that it was a mistake to look. Radiance’s front is now covered in blood—at least one of the scabs along her right shoulder has burst, so it’s begun to cascade down her side as well. Helplessly she flexes her hips, and her wings flail about awkwardly to bathe Unn’s flank in what Grimm hopes are weak and harmless buffets.</p><p>He has seen this before. He has seen this too many times before: All her flashbacks, all her nightmares, and eons in the past but still fresh scar tissue, the loss of her legs.</p><p>“If you’ll excuse me for a moment,” Grimm says faintly.</p><p>He does not wait for Unn to reply: He simply turns on his heel and crashes into the brush, the barrier between the glade and the rest of the Greenpath. As soon as he is far enough that Radiance and Unn can’t see him, he sinks to his knees and is sick.</p>
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<a name="section0003"><h2>3. clear spark of beauty uncut by pain.</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p><b>[ETA 2/20/21]</b> that note at the head of the previous chapter about this being radi time right now still applies, folks! i know everyone loves hollow very much and i'm glad people care about them getting a deradicalization story, because i do too! <i><b>however the comments section of a fic about the native woman they raped isn't an appropriate place to talk about that.</b></i> centering their pain over hers in a fic that is (among other things) ABOUT PAIN THAT THEY, SPECIFICALLY, CAUSED isn't a good look!!</p><p>please be respectful and save the conversation about hollow for a more suitable place and time!!! thanks!!!!!!!!</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“Friend Ghost, what’s the earliest thing you can remember?”</p><p>They’re on the bench again, Grimm leant back with his arms stretched out, head tilted all the way back to squint up at the faint sunlight: Still weak but warm. He is lazy with it. Turning his head to better look at Ghost and catch their answer takes far more effort than he’d like.</p><p><em>Not much, </em>they say, the lines of their little body all tense. <em>And what I can remember is pretty shitty. Mostly it involves burrowing out of a sea of corpses, and trying not to get crushed by all the fresh dead bodies falling from above me. My father walking away. Hollow letting me fall off a cliff. You know.</em></p><p>“That’s—rough.”</p><p><em>I didn’t used to be able to remember any of that, </em>they say. <em>Even my earliest fuzziest memories were all of being on the road, alone. Or—maybe I was able to remember more than that once. It’s hard to tell. Maybe it doesn’t bother you so much ‘cause you’re a god, but going through the barrier around Hallownest mortal is an absolute skullfuck.</em></p><p>He could lightly poke them about their claim to <em>mortality </em>given that Ghost is the sort of primordial raw material that could easily ascend to godhood themself with the right impetus. He won’t; it would not lighten the mood. Besides, they don’t quite seem to be finished.</p><p><em>I’m still not sure how to feel about having remembered it, </em>Ghost goes on. They pause to pick at the charm embedded into their body for a moment: But when Grimm idly entertains the thought of reaching out to stop them again, they set their claws on their thighs instead, digits stretched out, claws dug into their malleable shell. They puff out a breath. <em>My mother’s the one who made me remember, you know that? I finally asked her why the other day. It was so—roundabout, the way she did it, like, here’s this half of a charm, you should go find the other half. By the way, there’s something secret inside, don’t you want to know what it is—so deliberate, and like, fucking weird and manipulative, because she was definitely after me remembering all along. So I asked her why she did it. She said I had the right to know. She said if she was asking me to make a decision, of my own volition, on my own judgment, she could at least try to make sure I was making an informed choice. So if I—if I’d killed Hollow to take over for them, I wouldn’t turn out the same as them.</em></p><p><em>And, that’s, like—</em> Ghost’s claws fumble. They set their claws on their thighs again and knead restlessly, as though searching for words, not facing him. <em>It’s a good thing, objectively, like. Me having better and more personal context for what the Pale King did. But I wish she could’ve just fucking told me herself instead of making me fuck around and find out!!! I’d have liked some, I dunno, distance??? I could’ve </em>known <em>without having to </em>relive <em>it.</em></p><p><em>Anyway apparently my mother was the one who took care of Hornet after </em>her <em>mom went to sleep, when Hornet wasn’t training at the Hive, </em>Ghost goes on brightly. <em>So I guess that’s where Hornet fucking caught Hallownest’s whole, shitassed We Do Not Speak Of Our Feelings Or Our Secrets It Is Not Done bullshit disease.</em></p><p>“Ought I apologize for prying?” asks Grimm, who realizes he might have given his question more thought, or treated it as rhetorical.</p><p><em>No, </em>Ghost says. They huff out a sigh. <em>I’m fully capable of telling people to fuck off if I think they’re being nosy, and I’m also tired of not talking about it.</em></p><p>He nods.</p><p>
  <em>Why ask, though?</em>
</p><p>“I’ve been thinking, a bit, how we’re shaped by the scars of our childhoods,” Grimm says, rolling his shoulders back so he’s pressed in one long lounge against the bench, chin tipped back up towards the heavens. “Unn’s spoken to me a little of her own early days, long before Radi and I met her—that she was always alone, that she created the Greenpath purely because her solitude was unbearable. The Higher Being of the green and of imagination was forged in that loneliness.</p><p>“I see similar in you, too, friend—how you try so very hard to be self-sufficient even when you desire companionship, after a childhood where all that ought to have nurtured you turned against you. How admirable it is, then, that you’re trying to reach out even so. To change.</p><p>“We two gods of Dream were always together. As far back as I am able to recall. Two sides of a coin, two halves of a whole. Over the ages we grew to be different—<em>too </em>different for that sort of closeness to be sustainable any longer, but…” Grimm reaches up towards the sky with one lazy claw, grasping at the air as he grasps for words. “My heart remembers that we were born as the right claw to her left. The left claw to her right, the set of hindwings to her forewings.</p><p>“Ah, Ghost, it’s so much easier to burn in the Ritual than to burn with the conviction that this happened because I was fool enough to take my eyes off her for too long. Not knowing how much good I can be to her, anymore.”</p><p>He thinks about how Unn described godhood: A black hole of need. She was talking about his and her and Radi’s mutual craving for attention then but he feels like that now, only the gravitational pull and the emptiness of him is the need for Radiance. He can be a god without her, he learned the trick of that long eras past: He does not know how to be a person without her, though.</p><p>Grimm tucked his Heart away in his realm for safekeeping. It’s still breaking, and he still feels the pain of it in his earthly body’s chest. What a joke.</p><p>It is at this moment that Ghost hops onto Grimm’s lap, loosing from deep in his chest a little yowl of startlement. Ghost reaches up and claps their claws at Grimm’s cheeks as though to make sure they’ve got his attention. He resists the base instinct to bare his fangs and hiss.</p><p><em>You’re here now, </em>they say. <em>If she loves you even half as much as you love her, you’re doing lots of good just being with her.</em></p><p>“It’s… difficult,” Grimm says, and pulls a face. “Trying to balance her medical needs with her mental ones. The past few days have been… rough.”</p><p>
  <em>Has she said you’re doing more harm than good? Gotten angry at you?</em>
</p><p>“I almost wish she would,” he says lightly, to cover how it fucking kills him. <em>She </em>apologized to <em>him </em>for the shitshow with her leg, and wouldn’t hear a word about how it was all his fault in the first place for wearing out her day’s capacity for being touched when she still needed it. His selfishness, once again, like the poison in smoke.</p><p><em>I guess all you can do about that is make sure she WILL say so when she’s hurt or mad, and trust her to, </em>says Ghost. Then they clonk their face into his chest to frame his jaws with their horns, and hug him. Grimm very nearly chokes at the impact knocking the breath from him, but doesn’t. He slings one arm loose about Ghost’s back and holds them.</p><p>“How’s your sibling holding up?” he asks.</p><p>Ghost shakes him off to answer. <em>They’re mending, physically. As much as we think they ever will—Hornet thinks they just grew too much too fast and went through too much bodily stress, and they’ll always be vulnerable to injury and pain. But they’ll heal. It’s harder trying to find someone they’ll listen to. There’s so much they don’t want to believe, and some of the pure shit they say—I want to smack them sometimes, even though it’s not their fault they’re like this. Isn’t that awful?</em></p><p><em>But I don’t want to give up. Not on anyone, not anymore. Hollow’s my family. I </em>will <em>see them learn to embrace their personhood and give up their zealotry, to regret that—horrible thing they did, even if it takes me a hundred years.</em> They pause and look down at Grimm’s chest. <em>Hopefully it’s not gonna take a whole fucking hundred years.</em></p><p>“I couldn’t bear it if this takes a hundred years,” says Grimm.</p><p>
  <em>Right? So even if there’s not much we CAN do… I guess we still gotta do our best to make things get better, sooner.</em>
</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>This does not make it any easier for him to creep penitent into the glade, but: He <em>has </em>to. Radiance needs to sleep, so he needs to be there to defend her from her nightmares. It pulls him surer than the Ritual, though his steps today may still be slower than his wont.</p><p>He can hear Unn speaking long before he’s fully through the shielding foliage. At first her words are indistinct, and he can only catch her tone, gentle and reasonable. When he ventures closer, she gains clarity: “—it against you. Oh, don’t look so pathetic. Your head knows I’m right even if your heart hasn’t quite caught up. He’ll be here any moment now and you’ll be able to see for yourself—as a matter of fact, I think that’s him right there. Hello, Grimm.”</p><p>Grimm blinks in the glimmering bioluminescence of the glade, opens his jaws a little, and closes them again. He tamps down the urge to retreat and slithers through the last veil of green to set foot into the clearing with a flourish and a winning smile: “Good evening, my dears.”</p><p>Radiance, seated upon a particularly soft makeshift nest of grasses to rest her leg, flinches and puffs up. She doesn’t launch herself into the air—maybe to avoid exposing the bare stump of her thigh, maybe because she’s rather close to Unn’s flank and isn’t particularly wishful of slapping her in an inelegant takeoff. But her fur and feathers still stand on end and she gives Grimm this awful <em>look </em>all sidelong and fearful and for a long moment Grimm wants to open up his own belly and toss his guts to ignite them like firecrackers.</p><p>“Go on,” Unn says in that extra-patient, extra-indulgent tone that usually means she’s very done with someone’s shit.</p><p>“Grimm,” says Radiance, and then hesitates. “I’m—I’m so sorry for being so shitty and unhelpful yesterday. Are you—are you still very angry with me?”</p><p>“What?” says Grimm, opening his eyes wide, stretching up on tiptoe. “No, no, why would I be <em>angry </em>at you? <em>I’m </em>sorry, I—thought now you’d had some time you’d be <em>furious </em>about how selfish I was, and—and how I pushed you into things you didn’t want—”</p><p>“I was being <em>stupid </em>and someone <em>needed </em>to call me on it,” Radi cries. Her fur’s relaxing but she strains her feathers further apart earnestly, her eyes are very round. “I should have known better. I might have lost the rest of my leg if I’d gone on hoping the problem would just go away if I ignored it hard enough. And I nearly <em>speared </em>you, I could’ve <em>blinded </em>you and Unn both…”</p><p>“You tried so hard <em>not </em>to,” Grimm says, taking long slow strides closer: Slow, to prevent himself launching straight into Radiance’s front. “Even though we were hurting you. After I’d spent so long hurting you—pushing your limits. I could never, ever, ever be angry at you for panicking and trying to defend yourself.”</p><p>“It’s still not <em>right,” </em>she says stubbornly. “It’s wrong of me to hurt you when you’re only helping, even if it’s some sort of survival reflex. I <em>hate </em>that it’s a survival reflex.”</p><p><em>“I </em>don’t,” says Grimm, “because it means if anyone bad ever tries to hurt you again they’ll be sorry they do.”</p><p>“You’re not a bad person trying to hurt me, though. I’m so sorry. You’re really not angry?”</p><p>“Of course I’m not. I promise you I’m not. <em>You’re </em>really not angry with <em>me?”</em></p><p>“No. Of course not. I wouldn’t be angry at you for <em>this.”</em></p><p>All throughout this he’s crept closer, whole body shaking with the effort it takes to not arrow right up to her; finally he is about the length of his adult form from her, an acceptable distance. Radi’s wings are buzzing like she wants to hop, though she can’t on only one leg. Her eyes are wet.</p><p>Unn looks from Radiance to Grimm and back and says with deep fondness, “This sort of thing is why people keep assuming you’re twins.”</p><p>“Yech,” says Radi, as Grimm says, “Gross!”</p><p>“Stop having identical neuroses, then,” says Unn.</p><p>“I am <em>exhausted,” </em>Radiance complains, “at the very concept. I may pass out. Grimm, you can get closer than that. No, closer,” she directs as he tries to stop his juvenile wingspan away. “Closer,” she says again when he takes only one step in. Grimm holds his breath and sidles a forearm’s length from Radi’s fur, but she only looks at him and says “That’s fine.”</p><p>Grimm breathes out, and sits. Radiance twitches and flexes her feathers and closes her eyes. Grimm can feel Unn looking at the two of them with knowing smugness and doesn’t give her the satisfaction of meeting her gaze: Her reign upon the throne of The Functional One probably shan’t last <em>that </em>long anyway, the three of them trade places upon it often enough.</p><p>Instead he watches Radiance, safe between the two of them, slowly fall into sleep.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>It is dark, here.</p><p>So many of Radi’s dreams are.</p><p>This darkness is thick and viscous, like tar rather than oil. It’s heavy. Suffocating, even as Grimm knows it’s not real. He cannot see much further than his own claws when he stretches them out, charcoal against black. The dark around him pulls him gently downwards: He kicks, experimental, and finds that even with the torch in his hands he can swim in it as if through water.</p><p>It takes a moment of listening, and then a longer moment of straining his senses—but he finds her eventually, as a compass needle swinging towards a pole. Radiance is somewhere to his left and below him, sinking steadily.</p><p>The physics of the dream dictate that he should have to swim for her, and he could, but that would take too long. Surely she must be frightened, in these pitch surroundings. So he imagines a solid surface beneath his feet and spreads his wings wide, leaps into a steady downward glide. Through the smudgy dark he catches faint glimmers of light, like flickering stars viewed from beneath a great deal of water, and then—there she is, struggling to flail with her wings as she sinks further and further down.</p><p>“Radi,” he calls, banking, the unlit torch tight in his claws. “Radi, dearheart, can you hear me?”</p><p>“Grimm,” she cries. Her voice is faint and strangled with panic. “Grimm, Grimm, I’m—you can’t, you’ll drown too—oh, please, please. Help me.”</p><p>“We’re not going to drown,” he says, swooping through the black gunk to make a gentle loop about her body, not quite touching her. “This isn’t real, love. You’re dreaming.”</p><p>Radiance blinks. This close Grimm can see tears pearl off her eyes and float upwards, tiny little amber motes like sundrop bubbles. “But—but. I’m drowning.”</p><p>He takes a deep breath and then breathes out to show her. “It’s all right. See?”</p><p>Her whole body struggles against it, but she still takes a breath, eyes squinched shut, quivering from the tips of her antennae to the blade-tips of her feet. Grimm feels—buoyant, ablaze; he could weep.</p><p>He shifts his grip on the torch in his hands and then pauses to think. Unn has sheltered Radiance, protected her, but still given her small ways to take control, make decisions for herself. Is there a way that he can do that, here and now? Can he afford Radi some agency in her own rescue?</p><p>“Radi,” he says, slowly, voice catching in his throat so a phantom ache seizes in his lungs, prelude to things to come years in the future— “Radi, do you want to try changing the dream?”</p><p>“What?” she says, blinking at him with round eyes. She’s still breathing in fitful little struggles; she trembles as though against pelagic pressure that Grimm can’t feel at all.</p><p>“I think it’s possible,” he says. “Even though it’s a nightmare, it’s still your dream. Now you know you’re dreaming, you might be able to change things. I have less influence here because it isn’t my dream, but I can help you.”</p><p>“Change—the dream,” she says. She’s still sinking slowly, and Grimm dances a delicate spiral down with her.</p><p>“Like when we were little, Radi-radi,” he says with all the tenderness he’s capable of. “Do you remember that? When we were still only learning what we are—what we can do.” He stretches out his left claw towards her, and tucks the torch beneath his arm. He may still need it, if this doesn’t work. “I’ll help you.”</p><p>Radiance stares at him for an expanse of mindless seconds that make Grimm’s whole body itch: Then a spindly frail claw reaches out towards him, fur from the wrist up billowing in the water, the fragile digits stretched wide and shaking as though palsied. Grimm’s chest squeezes and ruthless pain grips him top to toe. He had expected her to reach for him with a wingtip, if anything. It must be over a century since she’s used her arms at all.</p><p>He wants to wrap his whole body around her, bury his face into her fur, purr until all her cares ease. He wants to sit with her and wet his forearms and comb her pelt out for hours until she glitters like fresh snow under the moon’s light. He wants to kiss her shoulders and sleep tucked beneath her wing. He wants her claws all over him and he wants to show Unn how she likes to be loved.</p><p>There’ll be time for all those things again someday.</p><p>Grimm touches the very, very tips of his claws to Radi’s. Once upon a time, when they were very young indeed—barely more than caterpillars—they made up silly songs, baby songs, to keep all the steps straight while they worked, as they discovered how best to mold the Dream about them. He’s forgotten the words over the myriads it’s been since he sang them last, but he remembers the tune, and he hums it low now, though his voice—his true voice, his adult voice—crackles around it like flame. When Radi joins him she’s not much better, thick and tuneless with panic and with tears. But slowly her body rights itself, and then she is no longer sinking. Grimm regains his natural red glow and then Radiance reclaims her golden namesake.</p><p>Still trembling she clasps his claw in hers, and spreads her wings wide. Grimm imitates her, and filaments of light gather around them both, and Radi beats her wings powerfully and they both shoot upwards, together. She strains her wings wide and so does he and the pair of them are buoyed up as though caught by thermals.</p><p>There is a great splash and they emerge into air that’s stale but nevertheless open, rocket up far above the black water. Radiance is breathing heavily with exertion and Grimm does not like to see the thick rivulets of oily liquid dripping from her body, but in her eyes there’s something faint and quivering like relief, or hope.</p><p>“You did it,” Grimm says, and his thorax rattles softly with the beginnings of a purr. “Look at you.”</p><p>Radi laughs a little, wetly, still shaky. Grimm takes the time to look around.</p><p>Below them is a lake like black glass, smooth and fathomless, spreading out in every direction. They are in a cavern like a cauldron with walls of fossilized gray, and in the distance Grimm can make out a shore upon which stands a battered tower. There is a faint noise in the backdrop: Low, grinding, striking an instinctive unease in Grimm that he cannot remember experiencing in a very long time.</p><p>“Do you know what this place is?” he asks Radiance. He intends to do so in a casual tone—no need to frighten her any more than she already has been—but something about the air in this place keeps his voice hushed.</p><p>She shudders. “The Abyss.”</p><p>Grimm gives the obsidian water and the dingy stone another look. Now he’s scrutinizing the area, he can see motes of black haze in the air that resemble the Void vapor Ghost emits when they bleed. He’s seen the mouth of the place before—Ghost brought the child with them once, to explore the Lifeblood chamber, so Grimm has murky access to its memory of that trip, a vague impression of infected Abyssal creatures crawling across the rocks and Void-stained broken masks strewn here and there, remnants of infant Vessel corpses. This place is recognizably the Abyss, but not the part of it he knows—certainly nowhere Ghost ever brought him, or the child before it was him.</p><p>He turns back to Radiance, whose fur is on end and who is trembling still—Radiance whom he teased for her fear of the crater’s depths when they were but young gods and the Void’s worshippers were already long gone, a civilization collapsed under its own weight, nothing but a cautionary tale. He can think of nothing that could convince her to venture to a place like this of her own will.</p><p>“Those creatures were made here,” she says in a ghastly whisper. “I have seen this place enough. The memories weren’t mine. Nor the nightmares. I do not believe it was intentional, because it was sporadic. Still. It was like unto being held underwater.”</p><p>Grimm squeezes her claw very gently. “What can we change?” he asks. “To bring light, or to find a way out.”</p><p>But she quails. “It’s not safe. It’s not safe. The lighthouse—it works by Wyrmlight. And the only way out—those <em>things </em>are <em>still there.”</em></p><p>Ghost’s assured him that their siblings’ Shades are gone, that they moved on once the Hollow Knight was freed. Here in Radi’s nightmare this probably does not hold true. “We don’t have to obey the laws of this place,” he says, gently. “Remember—it’s not real.”</p><p>She looks at him like she’s not altogether sure she can trust him, and through her grip is still weak the tips of her digits press against the back of his claw so hard it’s almost painful.</p><p>Then, below them: The sound of water stirring. Grimm, startled, looks down.</p><p>There are eight points of light in the water. From their brightness they must be just below the surface—Grimm hadn’t been able to see Radi until he was so close to her, when they were in the lake. There are eight points of light in the water and they <em>move.</em></p><p>If he strains his vision he can only <em>just </em>make out something <em>immense </em>moving within the water, ink against oil. He cannot truly perceive its full shape, but something of it reminds him of the many-eyed black blur Ghost becomes when they augment their short bursts of speed with Void. Yet this vast creature has nothing of Ghost’s warmth.</p><p>Grimm has seen the look in those white eyes before, in a hundred thousand creatures’ nightly terrors. That is the gaze of a predator gauging its prey. At Grimm’s side Radiance makes a horrible thin sound.</p><p><em>There’s something </em>there, she had insisted to him, over and over again, since they were young. <em>There’s something </em>down there <em>and it </em>hates <em>the Light.</em></p><p>Grimm remembers being cruel with childhood and laughing at her. <em>The Void isn’t </em>aware, <em>fraidy-Radi, it’s not like it’s going to </em>eat <em>you. It’s just darkness soup, just our opposite. We’re as much a threat to it as it is to us.</em></p><p>He remembers this, and curses, and slides between Radiance and the thing in the lake. He spins the torch in his hands and it catches right away, blazing scarlet trails in a circle.</p><p>“Radi, darling,” he says with as much cheer as he can muster, “I think it’s high time to wake up.”</p><p>Grimm staggers like he always does at the switch in physiology from dream to reality. Compared to the funereal grays of the Abyss, the lights of the glade are so bright he has to squeeze his eyes nearly shut, and even then his head pounds.</p><p>“Deep breaths,” Unn says. As he shivers Grimm wonders idly when she sleeps. “Concentrate on the air moving through your bodies. Pick out a few other physical sensations. You’re all right.”</p><p>“Fuck,” says Radiance. Grimm peeks up to find her with all her fur on end.</p><p><em>I’m so sorry, </em>he thinks about saying, or maybe, <em>I swear on my own Heart that I’ll never make fun of you for being afraid of the Void again. </em>But he’s barely opened his jaws to grasp at words before she looks at him and stretches out a wing, holding one feather up to his face, not quite touching him.</p><p>“Grimm,” she says, “thank you.”</p><p>He closes his mouth with a click. His vision blurs, and he has to hurriedly wipe his face before Unn lowers her head to nose at him.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Grimm escorts the very round, flowered Greenkin prophet into the glade on his arm, as though he is some sort of courtier bringing a maiden to a dance hall or something.</p><p>In <em>Grimm’s </em>opinion the prophet ought to be ashamed about the level of histrionics that have taken place in order for this meeting to happen. The only reason he’s not giving them an earful about it right this moment is because Radiance ended what was nearly an argument by staring him directly in the face with eyes glowing and a distinct aura of <em>I am no longer a pacifist and therefore Might Actually Beat You Senseless Like For Real </em>and said their side of the planning was not going to leave the glade.</p><p>(“You’re both acting like new-hatched grubs,” Unn had said from where she lounged halfway underwater. “And, Grimm, the idea is to keep these meetings safe and low-key. You know Radi’s going to have a hard enough time staying calm without you embarrassing her on purpose.”</p><p>And there was nothing he could do to argue with <em>that.</em>)</p><p>He wants to complain to <em>someone </em>about it, though. Perhaps Brumm or Divine, later. Because there is not a thing about this process that has not been <em>utterly ridiculous and also stupid.</em></p><p>Above and beyond all else the worst of it was trying to get Radiance to settle on where, exactly, in the glade she would be to greet her prophet in the first place.</p><p>“You could just stay right there where you are,” Grimm had said, pointing to the soft-grass nest she’d been seated on since the previous day.</p><p>She shot this down for being <em>too informal.</em></p><p>“You could sit on my back, if you’d like,” Unn had said, which was actually rather reasonable in Grimm’s opinion.</p><p>But, “I’m not sure if I’m ready for that,” Radi had said, and, well. Nothing to be done about <em>that.</em></p><p>Things only went downhill from there: Grimm and Unn put forth several possibilities, from building up her grass nest (still too informal; no) to setting up a hammock that could be made to look nice like a sort of throne (pretentious, would require a lot of consultation with her mantis converts including measurements of her body, putting the cart before the beast; again no). Eventually Grimm got tart enough to ask what Her Sunliness had in mind for herself, then, which turned out to be:</p><p>“I could just put my leg on for a while,” said Radiance sourly, “and I could fly, you know, <em>like a normal person.”</em></p><p>Which Grimm and Unn vetoed in heartfelt unison.</p><p>Radi threw a right fit about it starting with <em>I am meeting with them for FIVE!! MINUTES!!! </em>and it took Grimm and Unn the better part of an hour to tag team her into submission, destroying each outlandish protest in turns: Obviously she would want to put the leg on beforehand, meaning she would have it on significantly longer than five minutes; putting extra strain on the wound would be very detrimental to its recovery; the pain would surely wear on her dignity and might cause her to embarrass herself or take on even more toxic stress. Et cetera. Grimm said that if she <em>really </em>wanted to float for her meeting then it would be better to put it off until her leg’s better, which Radi insisted wasn’t happening, and then Unn actually took <em>her </em>side on that one.</p><p>Eventually Unn sighed and said, “I’ll just reorganize things a bit, then, would <em>that </em>be a satisfactory compromise to everyone?” and she raised the earth slightly and sprouted some strong but flossy nestlike plant atop the bump in the ground. “But I’m not going to do this every time, so don’t expect me to. It’s tiring.”</p><p>At this Radi finally came over abashed and apologized to them both profusely and agreed that this could be good enough for the time being. Grimm supposes the lesson learned should be When In Doubt, Leverage The Gay, but still can’t <em>entirely </em>avoid feeling put out that this isn’t a trump card he can wield on his own. Alas.</p><p>It is with this frustration burning quite brightly in his chest that Grimm leads the prophet into the glade to come face to face with the white-and-gray furball upon a miniature hillock that is Radiance, and the living mountain of Unn watchful in the backdrop. He does not <em>quite </em>calm upon seeing that even with concessions Radi is still bristling slightly, but then the prophet slips from his grasp to take two long strides forward and sinks to their knees.</p><p>“Oh, Radiant Lady,” they say, voice bright with devotion, with happiness. “How I rejoice to see you well.”</p><p>“You needn’t bow your head to me,” Radiance says with aching kindness. “Please. I apologize for not rising to greet you.” She looks for a moment as though she wants to make some sharp remark at her own expense, but she spreads her feathers against her flanks and swallows it. “I merely wanted a short time to speak with you.”</p><p>“Of course,” says her prophet. They shift: It takes a moment for Grimm to understand they’re now sitting upon the earth rather than kneeling. “Any moment spent basking in the warmth of your rays is a moment blessed.”</p><p>Radi hesitates for a split second—almost as if she doesn’t remember what to do in the face of simple worship. She takes a breath and rallies. “Foremost I want to thank you. Knowing what the worm was doing—had done to my children, I despaired that anyone should ever truly listen to me when I was imprisoned. Words can’t express how relieved, how grateful, I am that I was wrong.</p><p>“And I wish to apologize, too. Isolated as I was I had no way of realizing I had outside support, and thus no way to recognize where to stay my claw, but… no matter the reason, the result’s all the same to those I burnt. I am sorry for the harm I caused you. Unn and I both did our best, but we cannot undo the scars.”</p><p>The prophet reaches out one long claw from their foliage to touch one of the puffy flowers growing from their body. “Bright One, please don’t regret. I shall bear these marks with pride all my life. You fought to avenge your people in what way you could, and you succeeded. That is what’s most important.”</p><p>Grimm thinks from the way Radi shuffles her wings that she’d like to argue about this, but again she swallows it.</p><p>This time, though, the prophet seems to notice, for they say, very gently, “You understand better than any the harm your tribe suffered. My people did not intervene. So it is not for us to criticize what worked.”</p><p>“I was too late to do any good,” Radiance says bitterly. “And my method was messy. There is much I would do differently if given the chance to do things over again.”</p><p>“So would we all,” says the prophet, “and too late to save your people you might have been but in destroying Hallownest you have lifted a terrible yoke of oppression from all our shoulders. We owe penance for our inaction, and more than that we owe you much gratitude for our freedom. There is so much good that can only happen because you burnt Hallownest away.”</p><p>Radi scrunches her face up briefly. “And just listen to me, complaining to you, having you comfort me like this. Forgive me. This is hardly professional behavior.”</p><p>The prophet laughs. “Forgive you! Oh, Radiant One, the Green Children have not forgotten why we were born. It’s in our nature to comfort the lonely.”</p><p>Radiance makes a soft sound. Her eyes don’t leave the prophet, but Grimm looks past her shoulder to Unn behind her, who seems to suddenly find the plants on the water’s surface very interesting.</p><p>“This is a good opportunity for me to segue into something I wish to discuss,” Radiance says, “so I thank you. I wish for you to know that—though you took the role of my prophet before I was freed, I shall not bind you to me. I have no intent to demand your worship. You are Unn’s child and she is dear to me—here and now that we may speak with each other plainly, I want it clear that I don’t wish to seduce you away from her. If you wish to return to her service now or at any time in the future I shan’t stop you.”</p><p>“If you worry that my allegiance isn’t freely given, please set your heart at rest,” says the prophet. They press both their claws to the center of their thorax as though cradling something small and fragile. “The Green Children walked unto these lands from the dream of Unn and her cultivation is as the earth that nourishes the Green—but we forget too often it is the Light of Your sun, Bright Lady, that warms our leaves and grants us breath. I and those to whom I spread your words don’t abandon our love and gratitude to Unn our creator, and we shall always honor her. But it is our choice to whom we grant our fealty.</p><p>“Grieving Mother, I have heard Your terrible song and I have felt Your kind embrace. I know the heat of Your wrath and the warmth of Your tenderness and my heart shall never again be empty. Not I nor those to whom I spake Your words shall forsake the Land, but the dawn shall rise upon a great Union of the Green Mind and the Sun, the Land and the People, that we of the Land shall carry the memory of the People and the great injustice visited upon us all. I pray that in the shared Dreaming of the Light and the Green shall we together nurture the strength to see our Culture flourish once again from ash, that it might take root once more and stand impervious to any Pale invasion hence.</p><p>“Radiance, I shall follow You freely ere You cast me aside, or ere I take my final rest and return to the earth from whence I come.”</p><p>Even for Grimm’s taste this is rather florid, but there is still something hypnotic about the prophet’s voice as their speech flows into song. In the backdrop Unn is smiling, content. Radi looks near to tears.</p><p>“I thank you, Child of Unn,” she says. Her voice is very thick; she does not bother to hide the emotion even in the mental amplification of her whisper. “I thank you, my Prophet.”</p><p>The little moss ball beams.</p><p>“How—best shall I answer your loyalty, your worship?” Radi asks, blinking as though in an effort not to do so fast enough that her attempt to avoid crying should be obvious. No such silk cocoon can she pull over Grimm’s eyes, but maybe it works on the prophet, who hasn’t known her anywhere near as long. “I knew what my children wanted and needed of me. The Greenkin aren’t my area of expertise. I… could ask Unn, but I want to hear from <em>you </em>what I can give.”</p><p>“All we ask,” the prophet says, “is to be near you when you are able, to feel your rays. The Light itself is a blessing to us. Weaving together a Dream from both our cultures will be the work of generations and can’t be rushed. We know this. That is why we wish to be together with you. It’s the first step on a long road perhaps, but we have all the future to walk it.</p><p>“And it makes me very happy,” they go on, “to see you free as you should be. The skies have been dark for so long, but they are yours, and every day you take more of them back. Even through pain and hardship I can see you growing stronger through the sun’s light and the colors of the day. It is beautiful.”</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Radiance is quiet for a long while after Grimm returns from escorting the prophet out. At around the point Unn starts dozing Grimm surmises that Radi’s silence isn’t merely to rest her throat; he sits beside her and sprawls out extravagantly, extending one leg into the air in the most distracting way possible.</p><p>He gets no reaction. Mostly this is appalling, but there are some other emotions mixed in too, like amusement and worry.</p><p>“Geo for your thoughts,” Grimm says. Radiance doesn’t reply, so he rolls sideways propelled by elbows and heels to intrude as much as possible in her line of sight without getting <em>so </em>close he might court a host of scalding sunbeams in retribution. Still nothing. He splays himself out upon his back and kicks both legs up, waggling the feet. “I do hope this isn’t a <em>bad </em>silence.”</p><p>“What?” says Radi. (Good; Grimm was debating a little whether it would be worth everting his coremata to appeal to more than just sight and sound, or whether that would run the risk of upsetting her.) “Sorry, I was—lost in thought. That looks very uncomfortable.”</p><p>Grimm stops paddling his feet in the air and rolls back over onto his belly to stretch out, because she isn’t wrong. “How are you feeling, darling?” he prompts, raising one claw to gesture vaguely in the direction of the camp so she knows what he means.</p><p>“Small,” says Radiance. “Small and stupid.”</p><p>This was not the answer Grimm was expecting. He says, “That’s not the answer I was expecting.”</p><p>“I can tell you thought that and then said it basically verbatim because you think that sort of thing is peak comedy,” Radi says, and sighs. “I don’t know, Grimm. I put a lot of stock in being responsible for the people I made—taking care of them, being there for them, being the best god I knew how to be, even if sometimes I fucked it up. Because I <em>chose </em>to create the moths, and they couldn’t choose the god that birthed them. Parenthood can be so desperately selfish, that way.”</p><p>Grimm thinks of the child and swallows. “I suppose.”</p><p>“This is different. It’s so much more different than I could ever have appreciated. I’m so out of my fucking depth that it should be funny. I hope it’s funny someday. I was just—so—utterly unprepared for being <em>chosen </em>by someone. You and I have been stuck with each other from the beginning, and my children <em>came </em>from me, and so despite all these thousands of years being alive I’ve only just realized I have no reference for what to do in a situation like this. For someone to voluntarily come up to me and say hello, I’d like to build a relationship.”</p><p>“You can’t do Unn dirty like that, Radi-radi.”</p><p>“That doesn’t count because <em>we’re </em>the ones who found and chose <em>her, </em>and this is the other way around,” says Radiance. “Also we’re all three Higher Beings, we’re equals. It’s different from someone electing to depend on you. And shouldn’t you ought to know that yourself?”</p><p>“If you mean my Troupe,” says Grimm, “they’re… hm. Generally I ask them on a whim, or it’s extenuating circumstances that drive them to me. I wouldn’t say their choice is quite so free as your converts’ here.”</p><p>“Oh,” says Radi. She twists a little to look him fuller in the face. “That sucks ass, actually.” Grimm braces himself for another lecture upon the evils of his thrall, especially after centuries of wyrmly nonsense, but what she says to him is, “Now I feel rather silly about all those times I got self-pitying thinking I was the odd one out. I’m sorry, Grimm.”</p><p>And she reaches out with one wing to cast feathertips very briefly down his back.</p><p>Once more his whole body rattles with the force of an involuntary purr, and he tips his chin up to press his head into Radiance’s light touch as much as he dares.</p><p>She strokes at him for a short while, ticklish from lack of pressure, and then stills, and after that lifts her wing away. Grimm bellies down into the grass to prevent himself from chasing her instead.</p><p>“Are you quite all right?” Radi says suddenly, startling a stupid <em>mrr? </em>out of Grimm.</p><p>“Whatever do you mean, sweetheart?”</p><p>“I told you, I worry about you,” she says. “You and Unn both. I’ve at least gotten her to sleep more after all the stupid arguing she did about how <em>oh it’s fine she spent enough centuries napping </em>even though sleeping doesn’t WORK like that. But you, Grimm… it’s not just that you’re pushing yourself physically so much when your body’s still young. I don’t want you shouldering too much emotionally out of some stupid sense of guilt, either.”</p><p>He pushes himself up on his elbows to give her the most dubious look he can, eyes half-closed.</p><p>“You’ve gotten yourself into a lot of trouble in your life, getting drunk on attention,” Radi says, like a teacher scolding a student. “And, look, Grimm, I’m not under any illusions that I’m easy to care for right now, no matter how hard I try not to lean too hard on you or Unn. Trying to convince you to stop would be a pointless effort; it would cause everyone more pain than it would spare. But at least if you’re going to do this, will you be mindful of what other burdens you try to carry?”</p><p>“These things simply tend to happen, my dear,” he says to paper over how abashed he finds himself. “And oughtn’t I balance out the chaos I tend to unleash upon the world?”</p><p>“You have such a strange sense of responsibility for the self-proclaimed poster boy of stirring shit up,” Radi says, but with affection more than exasperation. “One day when I’m in better shape we are going to sit down and go over impulse control until you only ever get in trouble on purpose anymore. Which I still wish you wouldn’t do, actually,” she adds, “but if you’re <em>going </em>to do it anyway I can at least make sure you’re doing it with an eye to the consequences.”</p><p>“Oh, stop talking like you’re my mother,” says Grimm rather than admit he’s actually touched. “That’s gross.”</p><p><em>“You’re </em>gross,” says Radi, fluffing up the down on her back. And yea, the serious moment has thankfully passed.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Grimm is tasked with extending a meeting invitation to the mantises next. Where the prophet had accepted immediately, they instead ask for three days’ time to choose representatives rather than march the whole tribe in. Grimm tells them that this sounds fair. He didn’t expect this response, but now they’ve given it, it doesn’t surprise him: Ghost killed their de facto leader some time before they freed Radi, and both that mantis and the cicada who fought on Ghost’s side were buried near the camp. They likely haven’t had the time to formally decide how a new lord should even be chosen. It’s new territory for everyone.</p><p>“That works out fine for <em>me,” </em>says Radiance when Grimm relays the news to her and to Unn. “The more time they give us, the higher the likelihood I’ll be able to meet them with two functional legs instead of flopping around like a newborn grub in its nest.”</p><p>“I think we’ll be the arbiters of <em>that,” </em>Unn cautions, craning her neck to look down upon Radi from above. “Give us a look at how your injuries are faring for now, love.”</p><p><em>“Ugh,” </em>says Radi, but she doesn’t complain when Grimm closes the distance to her, and even leans a little against Unn’s chest so she can point her stumps at him accusingly where she sits instead of having to lie flat.</p><p>“Think all this bruising on your left will heal a lot faster if you leave your leg off for an extra hour or so every day,” Grimm says critically, and ducks his head when she swats at him. This almost plants his face directly into her middle, but he manages to swing his weight in time and skitters backwards to avoid overbalancing. He straightens up and brushes his wings off and continues where he left off, nonchalant. “I doubt we’ll be able to say for sure about your right leg until the day of, darling.”</p><p>“Damn,” Radiance mutters, but happily she doesn’t argue.</p><p>Her shoulders are still bad, especially the part of the scab that tore and reopened during that disastrous last check on her wounds. Her face is still <em>extra super bad, </em>so Grimm attempts to spend a little extra time fussing antibiotic gel into the cracks in her carapace until Radi says very flatly, “You have roughly ten seconds to stop it or I don’t think I can avoid blasting you with hard sunlight any longer. I am <em>not </em>being hyperbolic” at which point Grimm sagely elects to call it quits.</p><p>He busies himself with making the tea while Unn stretches out along the mossy floor and Radiance puffs all her fur out and fans her feathers to look extra big. He heats water with nectar, spoons in honey, stirs until there’s no resistance, repeats the process over and over until the liquid in the cup is a gold so dark it could be stone and it no longer emits clouds of steam. Then repeats the process for himself, only reheating his tea so it’ll be near boiling.</p><p>“I don’t know how either of you can stand that stuff,” Unn says, fond. “It’s <em>so </em>sweet.”</p><p>“It could be even <em>sweeter,” </em>Grimm says, sashaying deliberately. “Melt some sugar into it, add some fruit juice.”</p><p>“Also beer,” says Radi, still a <em>don’t-mess-with-me</em>-sized orb.</p><p>“You two are giving me a stomachache just talking about it,” says Unn.</p><p>“Whatever, <em>carnivore,” </em>says Grimm, fake-sneering.</p><p>“Don’t know if you get to make fun of her for that when you drink <em>mammal blood </em>even though you don’t even <em>need </em>it,” says Radi, flicking her wings just a little.</p><p>“I <em>do </em>need it,” Grimm says primly, “the salt content and the iron give me <em>massive </em>sex appeal.”</p><p>“Is this according to the mortals again? These same nebulous mortals who think sparsely-haired tentacles larger than your body that pop out of your ass are more appealing than small sensible fluffy coremata no bigger than your fist?”</p><p>“The very same,” Grimm says, “however did you know.”</p><p>“Well, I think that can’t possibly be objective, because in <em>my </em>opinion you’re a better fuck when you’ve only been on sweets.”</p><p>Grimm nearly drops his tea all over himself. He turns to stare at Radiance in bald amazement. Unn is looking deliberately away behind her.</p><p>Radiance isn’t fanning anymore and her fur is almost back to its normal volume. She looks lofty—looks amused, if anything. “Incredible though this may be,” she says with a nearly pitying gentleness, “being raped did <em>not </em>block out or corrupt all memories of sex I had prior to the massive trashfire that’s been the past couple centuries of my life. Shocking, I know.”</p><p>Unn is looking away even more deliberately. Grimm wonders if he should mention this. “I’d thought you wouldn’t—want to even think about sex,” he says, and swallows the <em>ever again </em>he meant to append.</p><p>“These things might be different from person to person,” Radi says, “but if you’re asking <em>me </em>how <em>I </em>feel specifically, well. Sometimes I don’t want to think about it at all, and sometimes I miss it very much. Thinking about how long it might be before I can handle it again is depressing. As a general rule I fucking hate feeling like—” she spreads out one wing and gestures to illustrate instead of filling in a particular word. “I wish I could just get back to normal already, especially when I’ve had a <em>very </em>rough night and it feels like I’ll be stuck getting babysat by both of you forever, like this is just my life now.</p><p>“I want to stay alive very much, and I want you to understand this is just how I <em>feel </em>sometimes, but there are moments when I wonder what the point of it all is if I can barely even deal with you or Unn touching me without immediately flipping into Fight, Flight, Or Freeze.”</p><p>Unn stops pretending not to listen and swings her head around. “Radi,” she says, uncertain, and falls silent.</p><p>Grimm picks up the two teacups with deliberate calm and approaches the girls. “Some of your limits will go away when you recover more,” he says. “Some of them might stay, and you’ll have to get used to them, but we’ll all deal with it, and we’ll get on with our lives. And that’s the point of it all—you getting on with your life. Not suffering forever because of things other people did, things that aren’t your fault.”</p><p>“Well,” says Radi, “if the bug who split himself in three and thereby gave himself chronic consumption says so, I suppose I can only defer to the expert.”</p><p>“Damn right,” says Grimm. “Additionally stop making fun of me for admittedly dumb shit I did just because once upon a time, or I’ll drink all this delicious sugar myself.”</p><p>“Fuck you, fork it over,” she says, and he does, and sits down at arm’s length to sip at his own. The heat of the thick liquid warms him all the way down, and he curls his claws upon the soft grass.</p><p>“Let me know when I can look at the rest of the cuts,” he says. “I’m glad we did all the worst stuff first today.”</p><p>“When I finish drinking should be fine.”</p><p>Grimm watches her drink. As close as he is right now the scarring around her palps is raw and livid. Her eyes narrow a bit as she extends her proboscis and the motion is slow, awkward, obviously pained. But she sighs once she’s touched the liquid and begun to drink. Her posture eases and she flutters reflexively.</p><p>He thinks of how fervidly Ghost proclaimed they would see their sibling become well the other day. The warm ache in his breast is likely much the same as what they felt at that moment, though he highly doubts the part where he wants to kiss Radi is very similar. He downs the rest of his own tea in one gulp and wonders if its hot glow is how it feels to be the sun rather than made of fire.</p><p>True to her word, Radi submits to Grimm’s ministrations after this with nary a protest but some bristling. The cuts and wheals and rare spellburn low on her abdomen still look angry, but as for the ones on her chest—</p><p>“These have finished healing,” he says, pushing her fur this way and that. “Finally.”</p><p>“Well thank fuck for that,” says Radi, who then breathes out heavily.</p><p>The scars will probably stay for some time, Grimm knows, but her carapace has fully closed over and there’s at long last no need to worry about it splitting open here if she pushes herself. He skims his clawtips gently through her down until his claw is over her heart, and he carefully teases hair and feathers away from the faded mark hidden beneath. Her coat’s very slightly discolored here—half a whisker grayer. If he didn’t know what to look for he’d never guess her beating heart had been torn from her shell, centuries ago.</p><p>But then, his own chest isn’t marked at all. Perhaps even Radiance’s scars might vanish after enough millennia have passed.</p><p>“Grimm,” says Radiance carefully, “I don’t much like it when you put your claw there.”</p><p>He pulls his arm back, curses quietly. “I’m sorry, love. I should’ve thought.”</p><p>“I only mind it because it’s your claw,” she says, more carefully still. “If you touch that spot with anything else—that should be fine.”</p><p>Grimm looks into her eyes for a long, long moment to be sure he understands her properly. She nods at him. It’s only then that he leans in slow and careful to press his forehead over her heart, instead.</p><p>He closes his eyes. Vibrating through the shell of his head he can feel her pulse, even the rush of her blood: The course of healthy hemolymph through her body, the bellows of her breath.</p><p>Grimm’s carapace rattles as he purrs. Radiance’s heartbeat slows marginally as she relaxes. If the seam of Grimm’s eyelids sting he keeps it to himself.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>“Is there some particular <em>reason </em>you’re taking up all the bench?”</p><p>He very nearly startles at the perfect Pale Court elocution; about the only reason he doesn’t launch himself upright hissing and spitting is the headache that’s pounding all through his arms down to his claws. Instead he cracks open one eye to regard Ghost’s sister, who has her spindly arms crossed at him.</p><p>“Would you <em>like </em>a seat, then?” he drawls, putting some extra weight into his accent.</p><p>“Yes,” says Hornet, tone matching her name, “if this is not already obvious.”</p><p>He levers himself up slow and theatrical, more because of the pounding in his head than deliberately to annoy her, and scoots. Hornet sits on the half of the bench he vacated. If he weren’t watching he would have missed the way she jumps just a little as if her instinct were to leap upright just as he nearly did.</p><p>“Anything the matter?” Grimm says.</p><p>“I am familiar enough with your larval form that I expected the bench to be <em>warm,” </em>Hornet says. “I did not expect it to be <em>hot. </em>Are you ill?”</p><p>“I wouldn’t say a migraine counts as illness,” Grimm replies, amused now. “But thank you for the concern, Princess-Protector.”</p><p>Hornet makes a noncommittal sound and crosses her legs, leaning heavily against the back of the bench. Grimm can hear little trinkets clinking together from inside her brightly colored cloak, which translates into a nettley feeling at the small of his back. If the headache hasn’t gone away by midday he’ll have to see if Unn and Radi will mind him napping for an hour or so, to see if that helps.</p><p>The clinking continues. Grimm follows the bend of Hornet’s leg down to the earth to see she’s bouncing her claw.</p><p>“Are you preparing for an errand or some such?” he asks.</p><p>“No,” says Hornet. “We have no such business today, though I’m set to make contact with the Hive again in two days’ time.”</p><p>Grimm looks pointedly at her. She isn’t forthcoming. He remembers Ghost describing Hallownest bugs’ reticence very colorfully and decides he must simply try again. “Out for a bit of fresh air, then?”</p><p>She gives him a sharp sidelong look. “I suppose the little ghost gossips to you from time to time?”</p><p>To this apparent non sequitur Grimm replies, “They sometimes share their frustrations. I wouldn’t necessarily call it <em>gossip </em>if it only involves them and the bugs close to them.”</p><p>Hornet sighs with her entire body: Interesting to observe because she doesn’t heave and flop and pose like Grimm would. She uncrosses her legs and sets both hind claws firmly upon the ground. “Then, you would know that we attempt to convince our sibling that our father’s heavy claw with creative corporal punishment was wrong and cruel. I am here because it would prove counterproductive to our efforts were I to strike them.”</p><p>There is a certain edge to the last sentence, as though it is a barb she throws for the express purpose of being shocking. If that’s why she said it, she’s misgauged her audience; there are many reasons why Grimm is wishful of striking the Hollow Knight, which is why he stays away from them. “They’re being a brat, I take it?”</p><p>Hornet breathes in slow, holds the breath for a long moment. Grimm gets the sense she has scrunched her face up beneath the mask, maybe because it’s the sort of gesture Radi might make. “It is taking—time to convince them of when language common to our father’s court is not appropriate. Under the circumstances it is easier for Ghost and Quirrel to be patient with them than it is for myself, though well I understand it’s not their fault how they were raised.” Here there is a long pause as if Hornet is chewing her words well before spitting them out. “Whether the ill fate they were born to is to blame or our father’s tutelage, their mindset is quite rigid.”</p><p>This is quite a lot of words spoken around the point, but by now Grimm has a good enough idea of what must have happened. Hallownest was not the only country in the world to look down upon arachnids, but among its ideological fellows it was a kingdom well known for its poor treatment of its neighbors. He’s heard of the Dreamers and it doesn’t escape his notice at all that while two were called Teacher and Watcher, Hornet’s mother was simply called Beast.</p><p>“That must be trying indeed,” is what Grimm says aloud.</p><p>“It would be easier if we could just find someone Hollow will listen to consistently,” Hornet says. “Mayhap the problem is how we’re all so dissimilar from the Wyrm; they might respond better to something familiar.”</p><p>“And of course you don’t want to emulate <em>him,” </em>Grimm says, nodding. “None of you could, anyway, any one of you has more kindness and good sense in your claw shavings than that man ever possessed in all his life.”</p><p>Hornet nods back at him. He thinks something in her posture has eased but is at a loss as to what, exactly.</p><p>“Do you need any more supplies—honey or bandages? Since I’m headed for the Hive soon enough I can add it to my to-do list, and one of us can package them for you.”</p><p>There is something very amusing about the idea that Ghost’s sister keeps an actual to-do list when Ghost themself always seemed to juggle upwards of ten hot irons with the aid of nothing but a few pins in their map. “You’ll never hear me turn down offers of either of those,” says Grimm. “I do thank you for your kindness, Hornet. You have every reason to hate us for our involvement—however incidental—in what happened to your mother and your country, and yet you’ve never extended a claw but to offer us badly needed aid. Perhaps someday Radiance or Unn will get the opportunity to thank you directly; for the present I shall have to thank you for all three of us.”</p><p>Hornet looks away slightly. “I will never like her,” she says. Grimm does not have to ask for clarification on which <em>her </em>Hornet speaks of. “I do not deny that I shall always harbor some resentment. But I shan’t oversimplify the matter and make this all out to be her fault, either. There’s not a bug involved without blood on its claws and right here, right now, these are the overtures that must be made to ensure history does not repeat itself.”</p><p>“A far-sighted stance indeed,” says Grimm. “We owe a great debt to your maturity.”</p><p>The lines of Hornet’s cloak shift as though she grips its lining from the underside. “I would not exist if not for the Wyrm’s crimes and the Old Light’s retribution against Hallownest,” she says very lightly. “This is not maturity. It is fatalism.”</p><p>Fair enough. Following Hornet’s own lead, this is likely time to change the subject. “How fares Deepnest these days? I’ve heard from dear Ghost what the news is from the Hive but I realize now I’m not up to date on spider gossip.”</p><p>Hornet goes very, very still. “I—haven’t been.”</p><p>Grimm turns to look at her, tilting his head. They are very nearly the same height right now, he realizes abruptly. “But the bandages…?”</p><p>“Are my own silk. I’ve practice enough binding my own wounds over the ages to provide first aid supplies for Dirtmouth, and for select allies. It is a worthy and productive task to undertake when one has idle claws.”</p><p>Grimm nods slowly. “But surely your friends and family could spare you time to visit your own home…? You’re to rule Deepnest now, if my understanding of crater politics is correct. Surely some kind of meeting to settle these matters must be necessary, if you wish to monitor the situation here.”</p><p>“You betray your ignorance, Troupe Master,” Hornet nearly snaps, rigid now. She takes a measured breath and her head turns smoothly towards him. “This much I will give you for free: Deepnest may be my birthplace and I its lawful heir, but in many ways I am as good as foreign to them. Most of the time I’ve spent there in my life has been in scant visits to my mother’s Dreamer bed, nary more.” She stands, barks out a laugh, takes her needle from her back and grasps at it. “My siblings’ mother always remarked upon how I resemble her. A fine miracle, this, for our meetings were tightly regulated at the Pale King’s decree and we saw each other seldom.</p><p>“No, if indeed there are any survivors of the Brood, they last knew me as a nymph, and surely remember me more clearly as yoke keeping my mother beholden to her oath. It should be the height of folly to march in and proclaim myself their new queen.”</p><p>This differs from the version of events Ghost told him. Grimm wonders if they’ve realized the contradiction in their assumption that Herrah went to her rest when Hornet was small, and that Hornet had been freely given into her father’s care—that the timing doesn’t match up to when the stasis went into effect. Maybe Ghost just hasn’t thought too hard on it; maybe they never realized Hallownest had a pattern with native children.</p><p>What else is Hornet bottling up out of shame, or because the Pale Court taught her not to speak of her own pain?</p><p>He wants very much to push and prod to see what he can get out of her because this <em>can’t </em>be healthy, but his headache surges. Radi and Unn need him to help with the converts today. Getting Hornet to unwind will surely be long work, would interfere with his prior commitments.</p><p>The memory of Radi telling him not to overdo it rears up, sharp: Both a relief and unwelcome. Grimm is only connected to Hornet through Ghost, and in Hornet’s eyes he’s more closely tied to Radiance than to Hornet’s own sibling. There are probably better individuals to have this conversation with her out there, and he needs to think on whose ear he should put a word into. To the part of himself that yearns to stay and meddle he delivers a deliberately cruel blow: <em>How much of this, Grimm, is just because you’re drunk for need of attention again?</em></p><p>So he merely smiles at Hornet charmingly as he’s able (meaning very!) and says, “I’m sure it’s easy to lose track of these things after the stasis, but my friend, don’t forget that you are <em>still </em>a nymph.”</p><p>Hornet stares at him as if he’s speaking another language for a long, long moment, then laughs again. The sound is far less angry than before. “You’re a pert one.”</p><p>“So I’m told,” Grimm says with deliberate cheer. “I’m informed it’s very winning of me.”</p><p>Hornet laughs at him again. “Check back in three days’ time for the honey and the bandages. If I don’t deliver them to you personally I expect Ghost or Quirrel shall.”</p><p>And away she trots, without a backwards glance. Grimm hopes it’s to blow off a bit of steam.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>The mantises choose three representatives, and when Grimm comes to fetch them they have all dressed themselves formally. The largest of the three, who takes point, has a rare purplish-blue hue to her shell and has donned a blue-green cloak and mask with scything horns in the same color. She is visibly gravid, her abdomen so round and heavy she must be due to drop her egg sac any day now. Grimm is unsure of the other two’s genders. One is shorter and slighter with less remarkable coloring but also dressed like the big one, merely in a purer green; the other is also gravid and has a white cape about their shoulders and a tool bag slung like a bandolier over their thorax, maskless. Grimm doesn’t know enough about mantis customs to fathom what their individual costuming means.</p><p>In the glade Radiance floats softly, both prosthetic legs attached after much arguing. Grimm had leant hard on the fact that Radi’s flesh keeps pimpling where the sores have broken her shell, demanding she keep her leg off; Unn had been more allowing but cautioned too that wearing her leg would demand a check-up afterwards and probably some painful medicine.</p><p>Radi heard them both out and thought about it and then decided to wear the leg anyway. “The mantises value honor and custom and ceremony,” she said, “and I want to conduct myself in a way they’ll understand to convey respect. This is a people that’s been ill used by Higher Beings before and now we’re having a formal conversation about the future, I want to show them that I’m different from the worm. Meeting them properly is a way to demonstrate that through behavior. It should go much further than any amount of pretty words.</p><p>“And if I’m still having these troubles with the leg later—there’s at least one interview I think would be better staged sitting down anyway.”</p><p>This being a sensible argument, Grimm had admitted defeat.</p><p>She does cut such an ethereal figure here, in the air where she belongs, faintly aglow from the various bioluminescent life of the glade. From the side Grimm watches as the mantis representatives all bow as one, upper bodies bent neatly over one extended claw. Radiance waits for them to rise and stretches her feathers out like she’s imitating how her children used to curtsy with their wings, bowing her head slightly in return.</p><p>“Radiance,” says the big one. The other two murmur her name in unison one beat later, much quieter.</p><p>“Thank you for honoring my request to meet with you,” Radi says to them in a gentle and serene voice that well belies her usual frazzled state these days. “I wish to at least begin a conversation about the future. First of all… I shall always be grateful for our alliance, but I do not wish to bind you to me against your will. If the whole of your group, or in fact any of your number, wish to depart to rejoin your original tribe, or seek your fortune elsewhere, know that you go with my blessing.”</p><p>The three mantises look to one another. The big one shakes her head and Grimm can see a bit of a smile in her profile when she speaks.</p><p>“You have done us a great service,” she says. “You joined claws with us in a world where many of our kind despaired that every nation cared only for themselves. You brought great comfort to the heart of our Lord when he was bereaved, and allowed him an honorable death in combat, for a cause he believed in, where we feared it would be his grief that should kill him.</p><p>“We have left our original tribe, but we have not abandoned all our values. You have shown us honor, you have shown us respect. For that you shall have ours, and you’ll have our loyalty too. But… we would like to know what a life together entails.”</p><p>“That’s one of the things I wish to speak of too,” says Radi, sounding relieved. “I shan’t force you to change your ways. My understanding of your customs is limited. As far as such a thing can be permitted as an outsider, I wish to learn, so that I can treat you with the respect you are due.”</p><p>“We thank you for this,” the big mantis continues. “We understand that violence… is not your way, when you are able to refrain. But we must hunt, and we wish to preserve our dances for they are how we celebrate, how we court, how we record our history.”</p><p>“But,” says the mantis in the white cape, as seamless as if this is a performance the three have practiced, “if you allow it, we wish to adopt what traditions of yours we can.”</p><p>“You—what?” Radi says. To Grimm she sounds genuinely surprised. “Really?”</p><p>“When our children are born,” White Cape Mantis goes on, “they will be born into a world that’s healthy and safe, one where we are no longer trapped as pawns in an invader’s foolish war. And we mean for them to know that this is thanks to the Light that reached out to strengthen us in our time of need.</p><p>“And though we are a warrior folk, not all of us are warriors by trade. I am an artist, and a historian,” they say, and they fold their claws together at their chest as though in supplication. “I’ve heard tell that in ages past your people were artists, and historians. And… as you have adopted us, I and others believe the best way to respect your people who came before us is to pass down their memory. We wish to tell their story in our people’s fashion, and… if you will allow it, we too wish to learn of the Dream.”</p><p>Radiance is silent for a moment. Grimm watches her face, watches Unn watching her face. There’s fathomless emotion in her eyes, which are brimming faintly.</p><p>“It may take me time,” she says at last. “Partly because I will need to think on how to interweave your ways with my children’s in a way that reflects on all involved with pride. Partly because… it is difficult, still, to speak of such things to new people. I don’t know if I can promise much, or promise that it can happen soon. But… it means a great deal to me, to know that you care.”</p><p>“Take your time, please,” says White Cape. “Many of us are parents or will be soon. We can imagine, just a little, how we might feel in your place. So we can and will respect whatever pace you choose.”</p><p>“There’s one other thing,” pipes up the third mantis, who’s been silent until now. “But it’s a conversation we mean to have with you and with Unn all together and we know this won’t be resolved quickly.”</p><p>“With me also?” Unn says, rearing up to her full height in surprise.</p><p>“Yes,” says the third mantis. “We don’t intend to return to the main tribe, and Radiance, we wish to stay near to you for the time being at least. So we wish to set claim to part of this land to build a proper village. But this place originally belonged to the Greenkin and we do not wish to steal it. We will barter fairly if we can.”</p><p>“This should be your call, I think,” Radi says to Unn, whose mouth is pinched with thought.</p><p>“Yes. Yes.” She’s silent for another long stretch. “I’ll think of something. Some of it depends on how much land you want and where. But my people and I could use help in removing all the invasive plants. There’s simply so much of it, and I make things <em>grow, </em>I don’t make growing things <em>die. </em>We can work a treaty out around that—if it’s agreeable to you?”</p><p>The three mantises look at each other again. Now the conversation has turned to menial politics Grimm has begun to bore. “This is fair,” says the big one. “We shall speak more of this at a later time, I think.”</p><p>“I’m grateful for your consideration,” says Radiance. “And it eases my heart that we’ve been able to open a conversation on these matters.”</p><p>The big mantis smiles and bows again. “It gladdens my heart too, very much.”</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Grimm surveys the Dream Realm from on high, wings spread wide. Here the thermal winds are bountiful and so he can coast with ease, no energy wasted upon vain flapping. The shadow he casts upon the thick cloud layer and the few ruins of dreamscapes that still remain is small and soft.</p><p>“You don’t have to go today,” Radi had said to him before he stepped through. “Today’s already been busy and you look peaky, an hour’s nap extra might not be enough.”</p><p>“I can have another nap when I come back,” he’d said flippantly.</p><p>“You can also have <em>tea,” </em>Unn had said, like a threat. “Have some sense for once, Grimm, you don’t want to bring your sickness on before you’ve even hit this body’s last molt.”</p><p>“I’ll be <em>fine,” </em>Grimm said, “and besides, this isn’t a job I can do all at once <em>anyway. </em>I’ll nip in to do some pruning and then I’ll be back to rest.”</p><p>There’s nothing they could <em>really </em>do to stop him anyway. Well—nothing <em>Unn </em>can do. Radi could theoretically follow him into her realm and kick him out, but every time anyone’s brought the possibility of her poking her head in she balks. So: Grimm can’t be brought to heel, at least not this time.</p><p>Radiance’s dwelling—the room where Grimm was born, to borrow from the old simile for mortals he picks at like a loose fang from time to time—has changed much. It’s bright, its weather calm, rather than the tumultuous weather it once saw before Radi’s long imprisonment, when she still hid here and planned her counterattack against the wyrm’s invasion. But it hasn’t been tended to for years—not by Radi’s own claws nor those of her children, who had long been trained as custodians. So many dreamscapes have dissolved back into the clouds, or are crumbling, leaving jagged remnants of strong subconscious. The air glitters thick with Dream essence hued from deep amber to near white, like ribbons of jewels, treasure left to slumber in its raw state.</p><p>He and she are the only ones who can enter this vast desert, now that Ghost has relinquished their Dream Nail. And while the house is still Grimm’s the room is no longer his. He can’t control it like his own realm; he can’t hold it and know it so easily in his mind. His task must be performed by claw.</p><p>The first time he ventured here he thought it would just be to put her heart at ease. Not in the sort of sense that he teased her when they were children—there was no cruelty to it. Radiance was unstable then, so much more than she is now: She was traumatized, she was terrified. She’d been trapped for centuries by her worst fear after a violent assault, then at the end of her ordeal raped and nearly killed. No one could fault her for being neurotic. For imagining monsters in every shadow and flinching from them.</p><p>Grimm gets close enough to one of the ruins to sense a wrongness about it, and smells the dry cold smell he’s come to associate with the Abyss, and with the Ancient Basin as it is now, reclaimed by the primordial dark. It made the child sneeze and it makes him sneeze now even in his true form, his red body twitching with the force of it.</p><p>He swoops, readying himself, and alights upon the cracked floor to gaze at the gummed-up black that a corner of surviving wall and pillar had shielded from his sight, up in the sky. The moment Grimm’s feet touch the ground his ears fill with the deep distant pelagic groan he last heard in Radi’s nightmare and the dark teems with little white eyes. Whips of dark flash out towards him.</p><p>Grimm raises his claw to the sky and cants. His voice is a smoky croak as usual here but the words echo from deep, deep in his thorax as if judgment passed and he scours the platform with holy scarlet fire.</p><p>The Void snarls at him in a voice that is not a voice, a voice that is the absence of a voice. Like the sounds a Nosk makes when it attacks its prey, but more like Ghost when they call upon the wrathful dead to scream for them. In the beginning one gout of flame would have been enough but the infestation has become quite entrenched, has become wise to Grimm’s tricks. It keeps bubbling up and bubbling up out of the cracks in the tile, snatching for his limbs. Grimm crushes it beneath his claws. Finally, a target for all that helpless rage.</p><p>(It’s misplaced. Grimm knows he’s lashing out. These remnants aren’t sentient, intelligent in an animal way but only faint slivers of whatever central consciousness the Void possesses. And besides none of this is the Void’s fault anyway, or it’s more the Pale Wyrm’s for going out of his way to prod at it.</p><p>The last time Grimm saw the wyrm at length was when Hallownest was still young, and he’d been selfishly annoyed with Radi for some reason he’s long since forgot—probably jealous for her attention. He knows himself.</p><p>He situated himself in the Pale Court to annoy everyone for his own amusement, basked in having everyone’s eyes on him, relished the thought of irritating Radi. The wyrm’s personality was awful, he’d known that even then, but he’d spent most of the week bullying the creature for his own entertainment or fucking both Pale Beings. The wyrm was wildly enjoyable to tease and good in bed and that had been enough for Grimm to overlook the rest, for that brief sojourn.</p><p>He can still remember how tight the wyrm’s throat had been around his cock, the way the hateful little creature had moaned and mewled to be used. The memory arouses Grimm’s disgust now as much as it arouses his body.</p><p>The worst part is that Grimm can’t even berate himself that he can’t believe his own stupidity. He is still this stupid, still this petulant, still this addicted to attention and still lacks any self-control.</p><p>If the Void—the true Void, not Ghost nor Hollow who can command it but the Higher Being at the heart of it if there is one—if the Void has any true sin in all this, it’s that it got to the wyrm first. Not any one of the children he abused and discarded, not the daughter he fathered to buy further conquest and then tore from her mother’s arms, not Unn whose lands he and his wife trampled. Not Grimm, though the wyrm had nearly destroyed all he loved. Not Radiance, who deserved maybe more than the rest of them all together the chance to kill this pale stranger that had tried so hard for so long to murder her all for his own vanity.</p><p>No. The Void snuck in before any of them and got its own satisfaction and thereby stole their chance for closure. There is nothing Grimm can do about it but boil and burn with wrath and envy.)</p><p>He burns and burns and burns until the little ruin is coated in ash and then scoured white. He hisses loud in victory and in warning and takes to the air once more, circling, circling.</p><p>Pockets of leftover Void infest the whole of the Dream Realm. Whether they’re leftovers from Radi and Ghost’s titanic struggle and the horror of the Hollow Knight’s surprise attack, or whether the stuff seeped into the realm as the Hollow Knight had forced Void into Radiance’s body as they thrust their arm into her throat, Grimm doesn’t know. It probably does not matter.</p><p>What <em>does </em>matter is that the Dream Realm is absolutely rotten with deposits of Void, and that Radiance is too out of her mind with fear of the stuff to venture in herself to deal with the problem. Grimm has done his best all this month to purge it in her place, only to find it continuing to build up like plaque.</p><p>The Dream Realm has to be secured. It is nonnegotiable. Radi’s realm is as much a part of her as Grimm’s is of him, and for as long as it’s contaminated she’ll still be sick. She needs to be able to access this place if she’s to rebuild her power, recover any of the legacy she’s built up in the past with her moths. She needs it to be safe for her own peace of mind, and so that she can retreat somewhere for her own protection rather than have Unn and Grimm with her constantly.</p><p>But there is simply too much ground for Grimm to cover, and this war of attrition is no help to Radi.</p><p>There are two solutions he can think of. Radi is going to hate them both.</p><p>For now Grimm heads for the next crumbling bit of landscape in the distance, head pounding. He’ll patrol for a little longer, and then he must return to his real body, and rest.</p><p>He can put off the inevitable for a little longer.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>hornet being a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolen_Generations">stolen</a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-Caste_Act">child</a> is very probably canon, though true to form this might be hard to pick up on unless you're familiar with australian history and good at reading between the lines. midwife and the white lady both have dialogue implying this, and the possibility's brought up much more directly in <a href="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Et1ExkiXEAEa_2k?format=png&amp;name=900x900">this</a> style note attached to herrah (screencapped from the wiki). hornet's unused "child of three queens (birthed by herrah, raised by twl, trained by vespa)" title makes more sense with this in mind too.</p><p>(judging from context clues i think this note is from after radiance's character was changed to establish her more firmly as a native god whose ideology was in direct opposition to tpk's, but still from the time period where team cherry planned for you to be able to get dialogue from each individual dreamer, so more recent than the old dreamer monologues that were dummied out. you can look at the style guide &amp; outdated removed dialogue for yourself on the cut content page of the hollow knight fandom wiki!)</p>
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